°      »> 


OFGKASS 


,1    IMPRINTS. 


^ 


^ 


S 

J  * '/ 


IMPEHTS, 


Jqlrope^  CHflc 


ON 


"LEAVES  OF  GRASS.' 


BOSTON: 
THAYER  AND  ELDRIDGE. 

I860. 


July,  1855,  Brooklyn,  N.  Y.— FIRST 

ISSUE  of  "  Leaves  of  Grass,"  twelve  Poems, 
95  pages,  small  quarto. 

July,  1855.  — Note,  as  follows,  from  E.  W. 
Emerson,  promptly  in  response  to  sending  one 
of  the  earliest  copies  of  the  issue : 

CONCORD,  Mass'tts,  21  July,  1855. 

DEAR  SIR,  —  I  am  not  blind  to  the  worth  of  the  wonderful 
gift  of  "LEAVES  OP  GRASS."  I  find  it  the  most  extraordinary 
piece  of  wit  and  wisdom  that  America  has  yet  contributed.  I 
am  very  happy  in  reading  it,  as  great  power  makes  us  happy. 
It  meets  the  demand  I  am  always  making  of  what  seemed  the 
sterile  and  stingy  nature,  as  if  too  much  handiwork,  or  too 
much  lymph  in  the  temperament,  were  making  our  western 
wits  fat  and  mean. 

I  give  you  joy  of  your  free  and  brave  thought.  I  have  great 
joy  in  it.  I  find  incomparable  things  said  incomparably  well,  as 
they  must  be.  I  find  the  courage  of  treatment  which  so  delights 
us,  and  which  large  perception  only  can  inspire. 

I  greet  you  at  the  beginning  of  a  great  career,  which  yet 
must  have  had  a  long  foreground  somewhere,  for  sttch  a  start. 
I  rubbed  my  eyes  a  little  to  see  if  this  sunbeam  were  no  illusion ; 
but  the  solid  sense  of  the  book  is  a  sober  certainty.  It  has  the 
best  merits,  namely,  of  fortifying  and  encouraging. 

I  did  not  know  until  I  last  night  saw  the  book  advertised  in 
a  newspaper  that  I  could  trust  the  name  as  real  and  available 
for  a  post-office.  I  wish  to  see  my  benefactor,  and  have  felt 
much  like  striking  my  tasks  and  visiting  New  York  to  pay  you 
my  respects.  R.  W.  EMERSON. 

WALT  WHITMAHT. 

June,  1856,  New  York.  — SECOND  IS 
SUE  of  "Leaves  of  Grass,"  thirty-two  Poems, 
384  pages,  16mo. 

May,  1860,    Boston.  —  THIRD    ISSUE, 

(inclusive  of  former  Poems,)  now  just  out  in 
a  finely  printed  12mo.  volume,  456  pages. 


Leaves  of  Grass 
IMPRINTS. 


From  the  North  American  Review,  (Jan.  1856.) 
LEAVES  or  GRASS.    Brooklyn.    1855. 

Everything  about  the  external  arrangement  of  this  book  was 
odd  and  out  of  the  way.  The  author  printed  it  himself,  and  it 
seems  to  have  been  left  to  the  winds  of  heaven  to  publish  it. 
So  it  happened  that  we  had  not  discovered  it  before  our  last 
number,  although  we  believe  the  sheets  had  then  passed  the 
press.  It  bears  no  publisher's  name,  and,  if  the  reader  goes  to 
a  bookstore  for  it,  he  may  expect  to  be  told  at  first,  as  we  were, 
that  there  is  no  such  book,  'and  has  not  been.  Nevertheless, 
there  is  such  a  book,  and  it  is  well  worth  going  twice  to  the 
bookstore  to  buy  it.  Walt  Whitman,  an  American  —  one  of 
the  roughs,  —  no  sentimentalist, — no  stander  above  men  and 
women,  or  apart  from  them,  —  no  more  modest  than  immodest, 
—  has  tried  to  write  down  here,  in  a  sort  of  prose  poetry,  a 
good  deal  of  what  he  has  seen,  felt,  and  guessed  at  in  a  pil 
grimage  of  some  thirty-five  years.  He  has  a  horror  of  conven 
tional  language  of  any  kind.  His  theory  of  expression  is,  that, 
"  to  speak  in  literature  with  the  perfect  rectitude  and  insouci 
ance  of  the  movements  of  animals,  is  the  flawless  triumph  of 
art."  Now  a  great  many  men  have  said  this  before.  But  gen 
erally  it  is  the  introduction  to  something  more  artistic  than 
ever,  —  more  conventional  and  strained.  Antony  began  by 
saying  he  was  no  orator,  but  none  the  less  did  an  oration  fol 
low.  In  this  book,  however,  the  prophecy  is  fairly  fulfilled  in 
the  accomplishment.  "What  I -experience  or  portray  shall  go 
from  my  composition  without  a  shred  of  my  composition.  You 
shall  stand  by  my  side  and  look  in  the  mirror  with  me." 

So  truly  accomplished  is  this  promise,  —  which  anywhere  else 
would  be  a  flourish  of  trumpets,  —  that  this  thin  quarto  de 
serves  its  name.  That  is  to  say.  one  reads  and  enjoys  the  fresh- 

(3) 


4  LEAVES  OF  GRASS  IMPRINTS. 

ness,  simplicity,  and  reality  of  what  he  reads,  just  as  the  tired 
man,  lying  on  the  hill-side  in  summer,  enjoys  the  leaves  of 
grass  around  him,  —  enjoys  the  shadow,  —  enjoys  the  flecks  of 
sunshine,  —  not  for  what  they  "  suggest  to  him,"  but  for  what 
they  are. 

So  completely  does  the  author's  remarkable  power  rest  in  his 
simplicity,  that  the  preface  to  the  book  —  which  does  not  even 
have  large  letters  at  the  beginning  of  the  lines,  as  the  rest  has 
—  is  perhaps  the  very  best  thing  in  it.  We  find  more  to  the 
point  in  the  following  analysis  of  the  "  genius  of  the  United 
States,"  than  we  have  found  in  many  more  pretentious  studies 
of  it  : 

"  Other  states  indicate  themselves  in  their  deputies,  but  the 
genius  of  the  United  States  is  not  best  or  most  in  its  executives 
or  legislatures,  nor  in  its  ambassadors  or  authors  or  colleges 
or  churches  or  parlors,  nor  even  in  its  newspapers  or  invent 
ors  —  but  always  most  in  the  common  people.  Their  manners, 
speech,  dress,  friendships  —  the  freshness  and  candor  of  their 


physiognomy,  the  picturesque  looseness  of  their  carriage,  their 
deathless  attachment  to  freedom,  their  aversion  to  everything 
indecorous  or  soft  or  mean,  the  practical  acknowledgment  of 


the  citizens  of  one  State  by  the  citizens  of  all  other  States, 
the  fierceness  of  their  roused  resentment,  their  curiosity  and 
welcome  of  novelty,  their  self-esteem  and  wonderful  sympathy, 
their  susceptibility  to  a  slight,  the  air  they  have  of  persons  who 
never  knew  how  it  felt  to  stand  in  the  presence  of  superiors, 
the  fluency  of  their  speech,  their  delight  in  music  (the  sure 
symptom  of  manly  tenderness  and  native  elegance  of  soul), 
their  good  temper  and  open-handedness,  the  terrible  signifi 
cance  of  their  elections,  the  President's  taking  oft'  his  hat  to 
them,  not  they  to  him,  —  these  too  are  unrhymed  poetry.  It 
awaits  the  gigantic  and  generous  treatment  worthy  of  it." 

The  book  is  divided  into  a  dozen  or  more  sections,  and  in 
each  one  of  these  some  thread  of  connection  may  be  traced, 
now  with  ease,  now  with  difficulty,  —  each  being  a  string  of 
verses,  which  claim  to  be  written  without  effort  and  with  en 
tire  abandon.  So  the  book  is  a  collection  of  observations,  spec 
ulations,  memories,  and  prophecies,  clad  in  the  simplest,  truest, 
and  often  the  most  nervous  English,  —  in  the  midst  of  which 
the  reader  comes  upon  something  as  much  out  of  place  as  a 
piece  of  rotten  wood  would  be  among  leaves  of  grass  in  the 
meadow,  if  the  meadow  had  no  object  but  to  furnish  a  child's 
couch.  So  slender  is  the  connection,  that  we  hardly  injure  the 
following  scraps  by  extracting  them. 

"  I  am  the  teacher  of  Athletes  ; 
He  that  by  me  spreads  a  wider  breast  than  my  own,  proves  the  width  of  my 

own  ; 
He  most  honors  my  style  who  learns  under  it  to  destroy  the  teacher. 


LEAVES  OP  GRASS   IMPRINTS.  0 

The  boy  I  love,  the  same  becomes  a  man,  not  through  derived  power,  but  in 

his  own  right, 

"Wicked,  rather  than  virtuous  out  of  conformity  or  fear, 
Fond  of  hie  sweetheart,  relishing  well  his  steak, 
Unrequited  love,  or  a  slight,  cutting  him  worse  than  a  wound  cuts, 
First-rate  to  ride,  to  fight,  to  hit  the  bull's  eye,  to  sail  a  skiff',  to  sing  a  song,  or 

play  on  the  banjo, 
Preferring  scars,  and  faces  pitted  with  small-pox,  over  all  latherers  and  those 

that  keep  out  of  the  sun." 

Here  is  the  story  of  the  gallant  seaman  who  rescued  the  pas 
sengers  on  the  San  Francisco  : 

"  I  understand  the  large  heart  of  heroes, 
The  courage  of  present  times  and  all  times  ; 
How  the  skipper  saw  the  crowded  and  rudderless  wreck  of  the  steamship,  and 

Death  chasing  it  up  and  down  the  storm, 
How  he  knuckled  tight,  and  gave  not  back  one  inch,  and  was  faithful  of  days 

and  faithful  of  nights, 
And  chalked  in  large  letters  on  a  board, '  Be  of  good  cheer,  we  will  not  desert 

you ; ' 

How  he  saved  the  drifting  company  at  last, 
How  the  lank,  loose-gowned  women  looked  when  boated  from  the  side  of  their 

prepared  graves, 
How  the  silent  old-faced  infants,  and  the  lifted  sick,  and  the  sharp-lipped, 

un^haved  men  ; 

All  this  I  swallow,  and  it  tastes  gopd  ;  I  like  it  well,  and  it  becomes  mine: 
I  am  the  man,  I  suffered,  I  was  there." 

Claiming  in  this  way  a  personal  interest  in  everything  that 
has  ever  happened  in  the  world,  and,  by  the  wonderful  sharp 
ness  and  distinctness  of  his  imagination,  making  the  claim 
effective  and  reasonable,  Mr.  "  Walt  Whitman  "  leaves  it  a 
matter  of  doubt  where  he  has  been  in  this  world,  and  where  not. 
It  is  very  clear,  that  with  him,  as  with  most  other  effective 
writers,  a  keen,  absolute  memory,  which  takes  in  and  holds 
every  detail  of  the  past,  —  as  they  say  the  exaggerated  power 
of  the  memory  does  when  a  man  is  drowning,  —  is  a  gift  of  his 
organization  as  remarkable  as  his  vivid  imagination.  What  he 
has  seen  once,  he  has  seen  forever.  And  thus  there  are  in  this 
curious  book  little  thumb-nail  sketches  of  life  in  the  prairit, 
life  in  California,  life  at  school,  life  in  the  nursery, — life,  in 
deed,  we  know  not  where  not,  —  which,  as  they  are  unfolded 
one  after  another,  strike  us  as  real,  —  so  real  that  we  wonder 
how  they  came  on  paper. 

For  the  purpose  of  showing  that  he  is  above  every  conven 
tionalism,  Mr.  Whitman  puts  into  the  book  one  or  two  lines 
which  he  would  not  address  to  a  woman  nor  to  a  company  of 
men.  There  is  not  anything,  perhaps,  which  modern  usage 
would  stamp  as  more  indelicate  than  are  some  passages  in 
Homer.  There  is  not  a  word  in  it  meant  to  attract  readers  by 
its  grossness,  as  there  is  in  half  the  literature  of  the  last  cen 
tury,  which  holds  its  place  unchallenged  on  the  tables  of  our 
drawing-rooms.  For  all  that,  it  is  a  pity  that  a  book  where 
every  thing  else  is  natural  should  go  out  of  the  way  to  avoid 
the.  suspicion  of  being  prudish. 


6  LEAVES    OF    GRASS    IMPRINTS. 

From  the  Christian  Examiner,  (Boston,  1856.) 
LEAVES  OF  GRASS.    Brooklyn,  N.  Y.     1855.    4to.    pp.  95. 
LEAVES  OF  GRASS.    Brooklyn,  N.  Y.    1856.  16mo.  pp.  384. 

So,  then,  these  rank  "  Leaves  "  have  sprouted  afresh,  and  in 
still  greater  abundance.  We  hoped  that  they  had  dropped,  and 
we  should  hear  no  more  of  them.  But  since  they  thrust  them 
selves  upon  us  again,  with  a  pertinacity  that  is  proverbial  of 
noxious  weeds,  and  since  these  thirty-two  poems  (!)  threaten 
to  become  "several  hundred,  —  perhaps  a  thousand,"  —  we  can 
no  longer  refrain  from  speaking  of  them  as  we  think  they  de 
serve.  For  here  is  not  a  question  of  literary  opinion  princi- 
Eally,  but  of  the  very  essence  of  religion  and  morality.  The 
ook  might  pass  for  merely  hectoring  and  ludicrous,  if  it  were 
not  something  a  great  deal  more  offensive.  We  are  bound  in 
conscience  to  call  it  impious  and  obscene.  PUNCH  made  sar 
castic  allusion  to  it  some  time  ago,  as  a  specimen  of  American 
literature.  We  regard  it  as  one  of  its  worst  disgraces.  Whether 
or  not  the  author  really  bears  the  name  he  assumes,  —  whether 
or  not  the  strange  figure  opposite  the  title-page  resembles  him, 
or  is  even  intended  for  his  likeness  —  whether  or  not  he  is  con 
sidered  among  his  friends  to  be  of  a  sane  mind,  —  whether  he 
is  in  earnest,  or  only  playing  off  some  disgusting  burlesque, — 
we  are  hardly  sure  yet.  We  know  only,  that,  in  point  of  style, 
the  book  is  an  impertinence  towards  the  English  language  ;  and 
in  point  of  sentiment,  an  affront  upon  the  recognized  morality 
of  respectable  people.  Both  its  language  and  thought  seem  to 
have  just  broken  out  of  Bedlam.  It  sets  off  upon  a  sort  of  dis 
tracted  philosophy,  and  openly  deifies  the  bodily  organs,  senses, 
and  appetites,  in  terms  that  admit  of  no  double  sense.  To  its 
pantheism  and  libidinousness  it  adds  the  most  ridiculous  swell 
of  self-applause;  for  the  author  is  "one  of  the  roughs,  a  kos- 
mos,  disorderly,  fleshy,  sensual,  divine  inside  and  out.  This 
head  more  than  churches  or  bibles  or  creeds.  The  scent  of 
these  arm-pits  an  aroma  finer  than  prayer.  If  I  worship  any 

E articular  thing,  it  shall  be  some  of  the  spread  of  my  body."  He 
?aves  "  washes  and  razors  for  foofoos  ; "  thinks  the  talk  "  about 
virtue  and  about  vice  "  only  "  blurt,"  he  being  above  and  indif 
ferent  to  both  of  them ;  and  he  himself,  "  speaking  the  pass 
word  primeval,  By  God !  will  accept  nothing  which  all  cannot 
have  the  counterpart  of  on  the  same  terms."  These  quotations 
are  made  with  cautious  delicacy.  We  pick  our  way  as  cleanly 
as  we  can  between  other  passages  which  are  more  detestable. 

A  friend  whispers  as  we  write,  that  there  is  nevertheless  a 
vein  of  benevolence  running  through  all  this  vagabondism  and 
riot.  Yes  ;  there  is  plenty  of  that  philanthropy,  which  cares  as 
little  for  social  rights  as  for  the  laws  of  God.  This  Titan  in 


LEAVES  OF   GRASS   IMPRINTS.  7 

his  own  esteem  is  perfectly  willing  that  all  the  rest  of  the  world 
should  be  as  frantic  as  himself.  In  fact,  he  has  no  objection  to 
any  persons  whatever,  unless  they  wear  good  clothes,  or  keep 
themselves  tidy.  Perhaps  it  is  not  judicious  to  call  any  atten 
tion  to  such  a  prodigious  impudence.  Dante's  guide  through 
the  infernal  regions  bade  him,  on  one  occasion,  Look  and  pass 
on.  It  would  be  a  still  better  direction  sometimes,  when  in 
neighborhoods  of  defilement  and  death,  to  pass  on  without 
looking.  Indeed,  we  should  even  now  hardly  be  tempted  to 
make  the  slightest  allusion  to  this  crazy  outbreak  of  conceit 
and  vulgarity,  if  a  sister  Review  had  not  praised  it,  and  even 
undertaken  to  set  up  a  plea  in  apology  for  its  indecencies.  We 
must  be  allowed  to  say,  that  it  is  not  good  to  confound  the  blots 
upon  great  compositions  with  the  compositions  that  are  nothing 
but  a  blot.  It  is  not  good  to  confound  the  occasional  ebullitions 
of  too  loose  a  fancy  or  too  wanton  a  wit,  with  a  profession  and 
"illustrated  "  doctrine  of  licentiousness.  And  furthermore,  it 
is  specially  desirable  to  be  able  to  discern  the  difference  between 
the  nudity  of  a  statue  and  the  gestures  of  a  satyr ;  between  the 
plain  language  of  a  simple  state  of  society,  and  the  lewd  talk  of 
the  opposite  ^state,  which  a  worse  than  heathen  lawlessness  has 
corrupted;  between  the  "  fiivy  /cat  ^t/dr^rt,"  or  "  ^t^dr^rt  /tat  fvvy 
fjuyrjvai,"  of  the  Iliad  and  Odyssey,  and  an  ithyphallic  audacity 
that  insults  what  is  most  sacred  and  decent  among  men. 

There  is  one  feature  connected  with  the  second  edition  of 
this  foul  work  to  which  we  cannot  feel  that  we  do  otherwise 
than  right  in  making  a  marked  reference,  because  it  involves 
the  grossest  violation  of  literary  comity  and  courtesy  that  ever 
passed  under  our  notice.  Mr.  Emerson  had  written  a  letter  of 
greeting  to  the  author  on  the  perusal  of  the  first  edition,  the 
warmth  and  eulogium  of  which  amaze  us.  But  '*  Walt  Whit 
man  "  has  taken  the  most  emphatic  sentence  of  praise  from 
this  letter,  and  had  it  stamped  in  gold,  signed  "R.  W.  Emer 
son,"  upon  the  back  of  his  second  edition.  This  second  edition 
contains  some  additional  pieces,  which  in  their  loathsomeness 
exceed  any  of  the  contents  of  the  first.  Thus  the  honored  name 
of  Emerson,  which  has  never  before  been  associated  with  any 
thing  save  refinement  and  delicacy  in  speech  and  writing,  is 
made  to  indorse  a  work  that  teems  with  abominations. 


From  the  United  States  Review,  (New  York,  1855.) 
WALT  WHITMAN   AND   HIS  POEMS. 


erect,  his  voice  bringing  hope  and  prophecy  to  the  generous 


8  LEAVES    OF   GRASS   IMPRINTS. 

races  of  young  and  old.  We  shall  cease  shamming  and  be  what 
we  really  are.  We  shall  start  an  athletic  and  defiant  literature. 
We  realize  now  how  it  is,  and  what  was  most  lacking.  The 
interior  American  republic  shall  also  be  declared  free  and 
independent. 

For  all  our  intellectual  people,  followed  by  their  books,  poems, 
novels,  essays,  editorials,  lectures,  tuitions  and  criticisms,  dress 
by  London  and  Paris  modes,  receive  what  is  received  there,  obey 
the  authorities,  settle  disputes  by  the  old  tests,  keep  out  of  rain 
and  sun,  retreat  to  the  shelter  of  houses  and  schools,  trim  their 
hair,  shave,  touch  not  the  earth  barefoot,  and  enter  not  the  sea 
except  in  a  complete  bathing  dress.  One  sees  unmistakably 
genteel  persons,  travelled,  college-learned,  used  to  be  served  by 
servants,  conversing  without  heat  or  vulgarity,  supported  on 
chairs,  or  walking  through  handsomely  carpeted  parlors,  or 
along  shelves  bearing  welt-bound  volumes,  and  walls  adorned 
with  curtained  and  collared  portraits,  and  china  things,  and 
nick-nacks.  But  where  in  American  literature  is  the  first  show 
of  America  ?  Where  are  the  gristle  and  beards,  and  broad 
breasts,  and  space,  and  ruggedness,  and  nonchalance,  that  the 
souls  of  the  people  love  ?  Where  is  the  tremendous  outdoors 
of  these  states  ?  Where  is  the  majesty  of  the  federal  mother, 
seated  with  more  than  antique  grace,  calm,  just,  indulgent  to 
her  brood  of  children,  calling  them  around  her,  regarding  the 
little  and  the  large,  and  the  younger  and  the  older,  with  perfect, 
impartiality  ?  Where  is  the  vehement  growth  of  our  cities  ? 
Where  is  the  spirit  of  the  strong  rich  life  of  the  American 
mechanic,  farmer,  sailor,  hunter,  and  miner  ?  Where  is  the 
huge  composite  of  all  other  nations,  cast  in  a  fresher  and 
brawnier  matrix,  passing  adolescence,  and  needed  this  day,  live 
and  arrogant,  to  lead  the  marches  of  the  world  ? 

Self-reliant,  with  haughty  eyes,  assuming  to  himself  all  the 
attributes  of  his  country,  steps  Walt  Whitman  into  literature, 
talking  like  a  man  unaware  that  there  was  ever  hitherto  such  a 

E reduction  as  a  book,  or  such  a  being  as  a  writer.  Every  move  of 
im  has  the  free  play  of  the  muscle  of  one  who  never  knew  what 
it  was  to  feel  that  he  stood  in  the  presence  of  a  superior. 
Every  word  that  falls  from  his  mouth  shows  silent  disdain  and 
defiance  of  the  old  theories  and  forms.  Every  phrase  announces 
new  laws ;  not  once  do  his  lips  unclose  except  in  conformity 
with  them.  With  light  and  rapid  touch  he  first  indicates  in 
prose  the  principles  of  the  foundation  of  a  race  of  poets  so 
deeply  to  spring  from  the  American  people,  and  become  in 
grained  through  them,  that  their  Presidents  shall  not  be  the 
common  referees  so  much  as  that  great  race  of  poets  shall.  He 
proceeds  himself  to  exemplify  this  new  school,  and  set  models 
for  their  expression  and  range  of  subjects.  He  makes  audacious 
and  native  use  of  his  own  body  and  soul.  He  must  recreate 


LEAVES   OP   GRASS   IMPRINTS.  9 

poetry  with  the  elements  always  at  hand.  He  must  imbue  it 
with  himself  as  he  is,  disorderly,  fleshy,  and  sensual,  a  lover  of 
things,  yet  a  lover  of  men  and  women  above  the  whole  of  the 
other  objects  of  the  universe.  His  work  is  to  be  achieved  by 
unusual  methods.  Neither  classic  or  romantic  is  he,  nor  a 
materialist  any  more  than  a  spiritualist.  Not  a  whisper  comes 
out  of  him  of  the  old  stock  talk  and  rhyme  of  poetry  —  not  the 
first  recognition  of  gods  or  goddesses,  or  Greece  or  Rome.  No 
breath  of  Europe,  or  her  monarchies  or  priestly  conventiono, 
or  her  notions  of  gentlemen  and  ladies,  founded  on  the  idea  of 
caste,  seems  ever  to  have  fanned  his  face  or  been  inhaled  into 
his  lungs. 

The  movement  of  his  verses  is  the  sweeping  movement  of 
great  currents  of  living  people,  with  a  general  government  and 
state  and  municipal  governments,  courts,  commerce,  manufac 
tures,  arsenals,  steamships,  railroads,  telegraphs,  cities  with 
paved  streets,  and  aqueducts,  and  police,  and  gas  — myriads  of 
travellers  arriving  and  departing  —  newspapers,  music,  elec 
tions,  and  all  the  "features  and  processes  of  the  nineteenth  cen 
tury,  in  the  wholesomest  race  and  the  only  stable  forms  of  poli 
tics  at  present  upon  the  earth.  Along  his  words  spread  the 
broad  impartialities  of  the  United  States.  No  innovations  must 
be  permitted  on  the  stern  severities  of  our  liberty  and  equality. 
Undecked  also  is  this  poet  with  sentimentalism,  or  jingle,  or 
nice  conceits,  or  flowery  similes.  He  appears  in  his  poems  sur 
rounded  by  women  and  children,  and  by  young  men,  and  by 
common  objects  and  qualities.  He  gives  to  each  just  what 
belongs  to  it,  neither  more  nor  less.  That  person  nearest  him, 
that  person  he  ushers  hand  in  hand  with  himself.  Duly  take 
places  in  his  flowing  procession,  and  step  to  the  sounds  of  the 
jubilant  music,  the  essences  of  American  things,  and  past  and 
present,  events — the  enormous  diversity  of  temperature,  and 
agriculture,  and  mines  —  the  tribes  of  red  aborigines  —  the 
weather-beaten  vessels  entering  new  ports,  or  making  landings 
on  rocky  coasts  —  the  first  settlements  north  and  south  —  the 
ripid  stature  and  impatience  of  outside  control — the  sturdy 
defiance  of  '76,  and  the  war  and  peace,  and  the  leadership  of 
Washington,  and  the  formation  of  the  constitution  —  the  union 
always  surrounded  by  blatherers  and  always  calm  and  im 
pregnable —  the  perpetual  coming  of  immigrants  —  the  wharf- 
hemmed  cities  and  superior  marine  — the  unsurveyed  interier  — 
the  log-houses  and  clearings,  and  wild  animals  and  hunters  and 
trappers  —  the  fisheries,  and  whaling,  and  gold-digging — the 
endless  gestation  of  new  States  —  the  convening  of  Congress 
every  December,  the  members  coming  up  from  all  climates,  and 
from  the  uttermost  parts — the  noble  character  of  the  free 
American  workman  and  workwoman — the  fierceness  of  the 
people  when  well  roused  —  the  ardor  of  their  friendships  —  the 


10  LEAVES   OF   GRASS   IMPRINTS. 

large  amativeness  —  the  equality  of  the  female  -with  the  male  — 
the  Yankee  swap  —  the  New  York  firemen  and  the  target  excur 
sion —  the  southern  plantation  life  —  the  character  of  the  north 
east  and  of  the  northwest  and  southwest  —  and  the  character  of 
America  and  the  American  people  everywhere.  For  these  the 
old  usages  of  poets  afford  Walt  Whitman  no  means  sufficiently 
tit  and  free,  and  he  rejects  the  old  usages.  The  style  of  the 
bard  that  is  waited  for,  is  to  be  transcendent  and  new.  It  is  to 
be  indirect,  and  not  direct  or  descriptive  or  epic.  Its  quality  is 
to  go  through  these  to  much  more.  Let  the  age  and  wars  (he 
says)  of  other  nations  be  chanted,  and  their  eras  and  characters 
be  illustrated,  and  that  finish  the  verse.  Not  so  (he  continues) 
the  great  psalm  of  the  republic.  Here  the  theme  is  creative  and 
has  vista.  Here  comes  one  among  the  well-beloved  stone  cut 
ters,  and  announces  himself,  and  plans  with  decision  and 
science,  and  sees  the  solid  and  beautiful  forms  of  the  future 
where  there  are  now  no  solid  forms. 

The  style  of  these  poems,  therefore,  is  simply  their  own  style, 
just  born  and  red.  Nature  may  have  given  the  hint  to  the 
author  of  the  "  Leaves  of  Grass,"  but  there  exists  no  book  or 
fragment  of  a  book  which  can  have  given  the  hint  to  them.  All 
beauty,  he  says,  comes  from  beautiful  blood  and  a  beautiful 
brain.  His  rhythm  and  uniformity  he  will  conceal  in  the  roots 
of  his  verses,  not  to  be  seen  of  themselves,  but  to  break  forth 
loosely  as  lilacs  on  a  bush,  and  take  shapes  compact,  as  the 
shapes  of  melons,  or  chestnuts,  or  pears. 

The  poems  of  the  "Leaves  of  Grass"  are  twelve  in  number. 
Walt  Whitman  at  first  proceeds  to  put  his  own  body  and  soul 
into  the  new  versification  : 

"  I  celebrate  myself. 
And  what  I  assume  you  shall  assume, 
For  every  atom  belonging  to  me,  as  good  belongs  to  you." 

He  leaves  houses  and  their  shuttered  rooms,  for  the  open  air. 
He  drops  disguise  and  ceremony,  and  walks  forth  with  the  con 
fidence  and  gayety  of  a  child.  For  the  old  decorums  of  writing 
he  substitutes  his  own  decorums.  The  first  glance  out  of  his 
eyes  electrifies  him  with  love  and  delight.  He  will  have  the 
earth  receive  and  return  his  affection  ;  he  will  stay  with  it  as  the 
bridegroom  stays  with  the  bride.  The  cool-breath'd  ground,  the 
slumbering  and  liquid  trees,  the  just-gone  sunset,  the  vitreous 
pour  of  the  full  moon,  the  tender  and  growing  night,  he  salutes 
and  touches,  and  they  touch  him.  The  sea  supports  him,  and 
hurries  him  off  with  its  powerful  and  crooked  fingers.  Dash  me 
with  amorous  wet !  then,  he  says  ;  I  can  repay  you. 

The  rules  of  polite  circles  are  dismissed  with  scorn.    Your 


les  of  pc 
esties,  hi 


stale  modesties,  he  seems  to  say,  are  filthy  to  such  a  man  as  I. 

"I  believe  in  the  flesh  and  the  appetites, 

Seeing,  hearing,  and  feeling,  are  miracles,  and  each  part  and  tag  of  me  is  i 
rairaclo. 


LEAVES   OF  GRASS   IMPRINTS.  11 

I  do  not  press  my  finger  across  my  mouth, 

I  keep  as  delicate  around  the  bowels  as  around  the  head  and  heart, 

Copulation  is  no  more  rank  to  me  than  death  is." 

No  skulker  or  tea-drinking  poet  is  Walt  Whitman.  He  will 
bring  poems  to  fill  the  days  and  nights  —  fit  for  men  and  women 
with  the  attributes  of  throbbing  blood  and  flesh.  The  body,  he 
teaches,  is  beautiful.  Sex  is  also  beautiful.  Are  you  to  be  put 
down,  he  seems  to  ask,  to  that  shallow  level  of  literature  and 
conversation  that  stops  a  man's  recognizing  the  delicious  pleas 
ure  of  his  sex,  or  a  woman  hers  ?  Nature  he  proclaims  inhe 
rently  clean.  Sex  will  not  be  put  aside  ;  it  is  a  great  ordination 
of  the  universe.  He  works  the  muscle  of  the  male  and  the 
teeming  fibre  of  the  female  throughout  his  writings,  as  whole 
some  realities,  impure  only  by  deliberate  intention  and  effort. 
To  men  and  women  he  says,  You  can  have  healthy  and  power 
ful  breeds  of  children  on  no  less  terms  than  these  of  mine. 
Follow  me,  and  there  shall  be  taller  and  richer  crops  of  humanity 
on  the  earth. 

Especially  in  the  "Leaves  of  Grass"  are  the  facts  of  eternity 
and  immortality  largely  treated.  Happiness  is  no  dream,  and 
perfection  is  no  dream.  Amelioration  is  my  lesson,  he  says 
with  calm  voice,  and  progress  is  my  lesson  and  the  lesson  of  all 
things.  Then  his  persuasion  becomes  a  taunt,  and  his  love  bit 
ter  and  compulsory.  With  strong  and  steady  call  he  addresses 
men.  Come,  he  seems  to  say,  from  the  midst  of  all  that  you 
have  been  your  whole  life  surrounding  yourself  with.  Leave  all 
the  preaching  and  teaching  of  others,  and  mind  only  these 
words  of  mine. 

"Long  enough  have  you  dreamed  contemptible  dreams, 
Now  I  wash  the  gum  from  your  eyes, 

You  must  habit  yourself  to  the  dazzle  of  the  light  and  of  every  moment  of  your 
life. 

Long  have  you  timidly  waded,  holding  a  plank  by  the  shore, 
Now  I  will  you  to  be  a  bold  swimmer, 

To  jump  off  in  the  midst  of  the  sea,  and  rise  again  and  nod  to  me  and  shout,  and 
laughingly  dash  with  your  hair. 

I  am  the  teacher  of  athletes, 

He  that  by  me  spreads  a  wider  breast  than  my  own  proves  the  width  of  my 

own, 
He  most  honors  my  style  who  learns  under  it  to  destroy  the  teacher. 

The  boy  I  love,  the  same  becomes  a  man  not  through  derived  power  but  in  hia 

own  right, 

Wicked,  rather  than  virtuous  out  of  conformity  or  fear, 
Fond  of  his  sweetheart,  relishing  well  his  steak. 
Unrequited  love  or  a  slight  cutting  him  worse  than  a  wound  cuts, 
First  rate  to  ride,  to  fight,  to  hit  the  bull's  eye,  to  sail  a  skiff,  to  sing  a  song,  or 

play  on  the  banjo, 
Preferring  scars  and  faces  pitted  with  small  pox  over  all  latherers  and  those  that 

keep  out  of  the  sun. 

I  teach  straying  from  me,  yet  who  can  stray  from  me? 
I  follow  you  whoever  you  are  from  the  present  hour; 
My  words  itch  at  your  ears  till  you  understand  them. 


12  LEAVES   OP  GRASS  IMPRINTS. 

I  do  not  say  these  things  for  a  dollar,  or  to  fill  up  the  time  while  I  ws.it  for  a 
boat; 

It  is  you  talking  just  as  much  as  myself I  act  as  the  tongue  of  you, 

It  was  tied  in  your  mouth in  mine  it  begins  to  be  loosened. 

I  swear  I  will  never  mention  love  or  death  inside  a  house, 

And  I  swear  I  never  will  translate  myself  at  all,  only  to  him  or  her  who  privately 
stays  with  me  in  the  open  air. 

The  eleven  other  poems  have  each  distinct  purposes,  curiously 
veiled.  Theirs  is  no  writer  to  be  gone  through  with  in  a  day  or 
a  month.  Rather  it  is  his  pleasure  to  elude  you  and  provoke 
you  for  deliberate  purposes  of  his  own. 

Doubtless  in  the  scheme  this  man  has  built  for  himself,  the 
writing  of  poems  is  but  a  proportionate  part  of  the  whole.  It  is 
plain  that  public  and  private  performance,  politics,  love,  friend 
ship,  behavior,  the  art  of  conversation,  science,  society,  the 
American  people,  the  reception  of  the  great  novelties  of  city 
and  country,  all  have  their  equal  call  upon  him,  and  receive  equal 
attention.  In  politics  he  could  enter  with  the  freedom  and 
reality  he  shows  in  poetry.  His  scope  of  life  is  the  amplest  of 
any  yet  in  philosophy.  He  is  the  true  spiritualist.  He  recog 
nizes  no  annihilation,  or  death,  or  loss  of  identity.  He  is  the 
largest  lover  and  sympathizer  that  has  appeared  in  literature. 
He  loves  the  earth  and  sun  and  the  animals.  He  does  not  sep 
arate  the  learned  from  the  unlearned,  the  northerner  from  the 
southerner,  the  white  from  the  black,  or  the  native  from  the  im 
migrant  just  landed  at  the  wharf.  Every  one,  he  seems  to  say, 
appears  excellent  to  me ;  every  employment  is  adorned,  and 
every  male  and  female  glorious. 

"  The  press  of  my  foot  to  the  earth  springs  a  hundred  affections, 
They  scorn  the  best  I  can  do  to  relate  them. 

I  am  enamoured  of  growing  outdoors, 

Of  men  that  live  among  cattle,  or  taste  of  the  ocean  or  woods, 

Of  the  builders  and  steerers  of  ships,  of  the  wielders  of  axes  and  mauls,  of  the 

drivers  of  horses, 
I  can  eat  and  sleep  with  them  week  in  and  week  out. 

What  is  commonest,  and  cheapest,  and  nearest,  and  easiest,  is  me, 
Me  going  in  for  my  chances,  spending  for  vast  returns, 
Adorning  myself  to  bestow  myself  on  the  first  that  will  take  me, 
Not  asking  the  sky  to  come  down  to  my  goodwill, 
Scattering  it  freely  forever." 


If  health  were  not  his  distinguishing  attribute,  this  poet  would 
he  the  very  harlot  of  persons.  Right  and  left  he  flings  his  arms, 
drawing  men  and  women  with  undeniable  love  to  his  close  em 
brace,  loving  the  clasp  of  their  hands,  the  touch  of  their  necks 
and  breasts,  and  the  sound  of  their  voice.  All  else  seems  to 
burn  up  under  his  fierce  affection  for  persons.  Politics,  religions, 
institutions,  art,  quickly  fall  aside  before  them.  In  the  whole 
universe,  he  says,  I  see  nothing  more  divine  than  human  souls. 

"  When  the  psalm  sings  instead  of  the  singer, 
When  the  script  preaches  instead  of  the  preacher, 


LEAVES   OF  GRASS   IMPRINTS.  13 

When  the  pulpit  descends  and  goes,  instead  of  the  carver  that  carved  the  sup 
porting  desk, 

When  the  sacred  vessels  or  the  bits  of  the  eucharist,  or  the  lath  and  plast,  pro 
create  as  effectually  as  the  young  silversmiths  or  bakers,  or  the  masons  in 
their  overalls, 

When  a  university  course  convinces  like  a  slumbering  woman  and  child  con 
vince, 

When  the  minted  gold  in  the  vault  smiles  like  the  night-watchman's  daughter, 

When  warrantee  deeds  loafe  in  chairs  opposite  and  are  my  friendly  com 
panions, 

I  intend  to  reach  them  my  hand  and  make  as  much  of  them  as  I  make  of  men 
and  women." 

"Who  then  is  that  insolent  unknown  ?  Who  is  it,  praising 
himself  as  if  others  were  not  fit  to  do  it,  and  coming  rough  and 
unbidden  among  writers,  to  unsettle  what  was  settled,  and  to 
revolutionize  in  fact  our  modern  civilization  ?  Walt  Whitman 
was  born  on  Long  Island,  on  the  hills  about  thirty  miles  from 
the  greatest  American  city,  on  the  last  day  of  May,  1819,  and 
has  grown  up  in  Brooklyn  and  New  York  to  be  thirty-six  years 
old,  to  enjoy  perfect  health,  and  to  understand  his  country  and 
its  spirit. 

Interrogations  more  than  this,  and  that  will  not  be  put  off 
unanswered,  spring  continually  through  the  perusal  of  Leaves 
of  Grass : 

Must  not  the  true  American  poet  indeed  absorb  all  others,  and 
present  a  new  and  far  more  ample  and  vigorous  type  ? 

Has  not  the  time  arrived  for  a  school  of  live  writing  and  tui 
tion  consistent  with  the  principles  of  these  poems  ?  consistent 
with  the  free  spirit  of  this  age,  and  with  the  American  truths  of 
politics  ?  consistent  with  geology,  and  astronomy,  and  phrenol 
ogy,  and  human  physiology  ?  consistent  with  the  sublimity  of 
immortality  and  the  directness  of  common  sense  ? 

If  in  this  poem  the  United  States  have  found  their  poetic 
voice  and  taken  measure  and  form,  is  it  any  more  than  a  begin 
ning  ?  Walt  Whitman  himself  disclaims  singularity  in  his 
work,  and  announces  the  coming  after  him  of  great  successions 
of  poets,  and  that  he  but  lifts  his  finger  to  give  the  signal. 

Was  he  not  needed  ?  Has  not  literature  been  bred  in-and-in 
long  enough  ?  Has  it  not  become  unbearably  artificial  ? 

Shall  a  man  of  faith  and  practice  in  the  simplicity  of  real 
things  be  called  eccentric,  while  every  disciple  of  the  fictitious 
school  writes  without  question  ? 

Shall  it  still  be  the  amazement  of  the  light  and  dark  that 
freshness  of  expression  is  the  rarest  quality  of  all  ? 

You  have  come  in  good  time,  Walt  Whitman  !  In  opinions, 
in  manners,  in  costumes,  in  books,  in  the  aims  and  occupancy 
of  life,  in  associates,  in  poems,  conformity  to  all  unnatural  and 
tainted  customs  passes  without  remark,  while  perfect  natural 
ness,  health,  faith,  self-reliance,  and  all  primal  expressions  of 
the  manliest  love  and  friendship,  subject  one  to  the  stare  and 
controversy  of  the  world. 


14  LEAVES   OF   GRASS    TMPRINT8. 

From  the  Crayon,  (N.  Y.  1856.) 
STUDIES   AMONG  THE   LEAVES. 

THE  ASSEMBLY  OP  EXTREMES.  —  A  siibtle  old  proverb  says, 
"extremes  meet,"  and  science,  art,  and  even  morality,  some 
times  testify  to  the  truth  of  the  proverb ;  and  there  are  some 
curious  problems  involved  in  the  demonstration  of  it.  The 
loftiest  attainment  of  the  wisdom  and  worth  of  age  only  reaches 
to  the  simplicity  and  fervor  of  childhood,  from  which  we  all  start, 
and  returning  to  which  we  are  blessed.  Art  makes  the  same 
voyage  round  its  sphere,  holding  ever  westward  its  way  into  new 
and  unexplored  regions,  until  it,  doing  what  Columbus  would 
have  done,  had  his  faith  and  self-denial  been  greater,  reaches 
the  east  again.  If  the  individual,  Columbus,  failed  to  accom 
plish  the  destiny,  the  class,  Columbus,  fails  never.  And  so,  in 
art,  what  no  one  does,  the  many  accomplish,  and  finally,  the 
cycle  is  filled. 

We  see  this  most  forcibly  in  the  comparison  of  two  late  poems, 
as  unlike,  at  first  thought,  as  two  could  be,  and  yet  in  which  the 
most  striking  likenesses  prevail,  "MAUD,"*  and  "LEAVES  OP 
GRASS  ;"  f  the  one  as  refined  in  its  art  as  the  most  refined, 
delicate  in  its  stucture,  and  consummate  in  its  subtlety  of  ex 
pression  ;  the  other  rude  and  rough,  and  heedless  in  its  forms  — 
nonchalant  in  everything  but  its  essential  ideas.  The  one  comes 
from  the  last  stage  of  cultivation  of  the  Old  World,  and  shows 
evidence  of  morbid,  luxurious  waste  of  power,  and  contempt  of 
mental  wealth,  from  inability  longer  to  appreciate  the  propriety 
of  subjects  on  which  to  expend  it;  as,  to  one  who  has  o^er- 
lived,  all  values  are  the  same,  because  nothing,  and  indifferent; 
while  the  other,  from  among  the  "  roughs,"  is  morbid  from 
overgrowth,  and  likewise  prodigal  of  its  thought-treasure,  be 
cause  it  has  so  much  that  it  can  afford  to  throw  it  away  on 
everything,  and  considers  all  things  that  are,  as  equally  worth 
gilding.  The  subject  of  MAUD  is  nothing  —  a  mere  common 
place  incident,  but  artistically  dealt  with  —  a  blanched,  decayed 
sea-shell,  around  which  the  amber  has  gathered ;  and  that  of 
the  newer  poem  is  equally  nothing,  blades  of  sea-grass  amber- 
cemented.  Both  are  characterized  by  the  extreme  of  affectation 
of  suggestiveness —  piers  of  thought  being  given,  over  which  the 
reader  must  throw  his  own  arches.  Both  are  bold,  defiant  of 
laws  which  attempt  to  regulate  forms,  and  of  those  which  should 
regulate  essences.  Maud  is  irreligious  through  merit;;]  disease, 
produced  by  excess  of  sentimental  action  —  '•  Leaves  of  Grass," 
through  irregularly-developed  mental  action  and  insufficiency 
of  sentiment.  A  calmer  perception  of  Nature  would  have  cor- 

*  "  Maud  and  other  Poems,"  by  Alfred  Tennyson.    Ticknor  &  Fields,  Boston, 
t "  Leaves  of  Grass."    Brooklyn,  N.  Y. 


LEAVES   OF  GHASS   IMPRINTS.  15 

rected  in  Tennyson  that  feeling  which  looks  upon  sorrow  as  the 
only  thing  poetic,  and  serenity  and  holy  trust  as  things  to  which 
love  has  no  alliance  ;  while  a  higher  seeing  of  nature  would  have 
shown  Walt  Whitman  that  all  things  in  nature  are  not  alike 
beautiful,  or  to  be  loved  and  honored  by  song. 

Although  it  is  mainly  with  the  art  of  the  two  poems  that  we 
have  to  deal,  the  form  rather  than  the  motive,  yet  so  entirely 
does  the  former  arise  from  the  latter,  that  the  criticism  passed 
on  the  one  must  lie  upon  the  other.  In  the  mere  versification, 
for  instance,  of  both,  see  what  indifference  to  the  dignity  of 
verse  (while  there  is  still  the  extorted  homage  to  its  forms), 
arising  in  both  cases,  it  would  seem,  from  an  overweening 
confidence  in  the  value  of  what  is  said,  as  in  the  following 
passages : 

"  Long  have  I  sighed  for  a  calm  ;  God  grant  I  may  find  it  at  last! 
It  will  never  be  broken  by  Maud,  she  has  neither  savor  nor  salt, 
But  a  cold,  clear,  cut  face,  as  I  found  when  her  carriage  past, 
Perfectly  beautiful:  let  it  be  granted  her:  where  Is  the  fault  ?  " 

Maud,  Sec.  ii.,  St.  1. 

"  Do  you  suspect  death?    If  I  were  to  suspect  death,  I  should  die  now. 
Do  you  think  I  could  walk  pleasantly  and  well-suited  toward  annihilation? 

Pleasantly  and  well-suited  I  walk, 

"Whither  I  walk  I  cannot  define,  but  I  know  it  is  good. 

The  whole  universe  indicates  that  it  is  good. 

The  past  and  present  indicate  that  it  is  good."  Leaves  of  Grass,  p.  69. 

All  Tennyson's  exquisite  care  over  his  lines  produces  no  other 
impression  than  that  which  Walt  Whitman's  carelessness  arrives 
at ;  viz.,  nonchalance  with  regard  to  forms.  In  either  case,  it  is 
an  imperfection,  we  are  bold  to  say,  since  we  do  not  love  beauty 
and  perfection  of  form  for  nothing,  nor  can  the  measure  of 
poetic  feeling  be  full  when  we  do  not  care  for  the  highest  grace 
and  symmetry  of  construction.  It  is  an  impertinence  which 
says  to  us,  "my  ideas  are  so  fine  that  they  need  no  dressing 
up,"  even  greater  than  that  which  says,  "  mine  are  so  fine  that 
they  cannot  be  dressed  as  well  as  they  deserve."  The  child 
like  instinct  demands  perfect  melody  as  an  essential  to  perfect 
poetry,  and  more  than  that,  the  melodious  thought  will  work 
out  its  just  and  adequate  form  by  the  essential  law  of  its  spirit 
ual  organization  —  when  the  heart  sings,  the  feet  will  move  to 
its  music.  An  unjust  measure  in  verse  is  prima  facie  evidence 
of  a  jarring  note  in  the  soul  of  the  poem,  and  studied  or  per 
mitted  irregularity  of  form  proves  an  arrogant  self-estimation  or 
irreverence  in  the  poet ;  and  both  these  poems  are  irreverent, 
irreligious,  in  fact.  Maud  commences,  singularly  enough,  with 
the  words,  "  I  hate,"  and  the  whole  sentiment  of  the  poem 
ignores  the  nobler  and  purer  feelings  of  humanity  —  it  is  full  of 
hatred  and  morbid  feeling,  diseased  from  pure  worldliness. 
This  is  well  enough  for  one  whom  the  world  calls  a  laureate,  but 
the  true  poet  seeks  a  laurel  that  the  world  cannot  gather,  grow- 


16  LEAVES   OF  GHASS  IMPRINTS. 

ing  on  mountains  where  its  feet  never  tread ;  he  lives  with  beauty 
and  things  holy,  or,  if  evil  things  come  to  him,  it  is  that  they 
may  be  commanded  behind  him.  "Maud"  rambles  and  raves 
through  human  love  and  human  hate,  and  the  hero  lives  his  life 
of  selfish  desire  and  selfish  enjoyment,  and  then  through  the 
bitterness  of  selfish  regret  and  despair,  without  one  thought  of 
anything  better  than  himself — the  summit  of  creation.  He 
worships  nothing,  even  reverences  nothing,  his  love  is  only  pas 
sion,  and  his  only  thought  of  God  one  of  fear.  In  his  happiness, 
he  is  a  cynic,  in  his  unhappiness,  a  madman. 

"For  the  drift  of  the  Maker  is  dark,  an  Isis  hid  by  the  veil. 
Who  knows  the  ways  of  the  world,  how  God  will  bring  them  about? 
Our  planet  is  one,  the  suns  are  ninny,  the  world  is  wide. 
Shall  I  weep  if  a  Poland  fall?  shall  'I  shriek  if  a  Hungary  fail? 
Or  an  infant  civilization  be  ruled  with  rod  or  with  knout? 
I  have  not  made  the  world,  and  lie  that  made  it  will  guide. 

Be  mine  a  philosopher's  life  in  the  quiet  woodland  ways, 

Where  if  I  cannot  be  gay  let  a  passionless  peace  be  my  lot, 

Far  oft' from  the  clamor  of  liars  belied  in  the  hubbub  of  lies; 

From  the  long-necked  geese  of  the  world  that  are  ever  hissing  dispraise, 

Because  their  natures  are  little,  and,  whether  he  heed  it  or  not, 

Where  each  mail  walks  with  his  head  in  a  cloud  of  poisonous  flies. 

Dead,  long  dead, 

Long  dead! 

And  my  heart  is  a  handful  of  dust, 

And  the  wheels  go  over  my  head, 

And  my  bones  are  shaken  with  pain, 

For  into  a  shallow  grave  they  are  thrust, 

Onlv  a  yard  beneath  the  street, 

And  the  hoofs  of  the  horses  beat,  beat, 

The  hoofs  of  the  horses  boat, 

Beat  into  my  scalp  and  my  brain, 

With  never  an  end  to  the  stream  of  passing  feet, 

Driving,  hurrying,  marrying,  burying, 

Clamor  and  rumble,  and  ringing  and  clatter, 

And  here  beneath  it  is  all  as  bad, 

For  I  thought  the  dead  had  peace,  but  it  is  not  so; 

To  have  no  peace  in  the  grave,  is  that  not  sad? 

But  up  and  down  and  to  and  fro, 

Ever  about  me  the  dead  men  go; 

And  then  to  hear  a  dead  man  chatter 

Is  enough  to  drive  one  mad. 

Wretchedcst  age  since  Time  began, 

The3r  cannot  even  bury  a  man; 

And  though  we  paid  our  tithes  in  the  days  that  are  gone, 

Not  a  bell  was  rung,  not  a  praver  was  read: 

It  is  that  which  makes  us  loud  in  the  world  of  the  dead; 

There  is  none  that  does  his  work,  not  one; 

A  touch  of  their  office  might  have  sufficed. 

But  the  ch'.irehmen  fain  would  kill  their  church," 

As  the  churches  have  killed  their  Christ. 

See.  there  is  one  of  us  sobbing, 

No  limit  to  his  distress; 

And  anotli.-r,  a  lord  of  all  things,  praying 

To  his  own  great  self,  as  I  guess; 

And  another  a  statesman  there,  betraying 

His  p'irty  secret,  fool,  to  tin;  pro»; 

Aiul  yond<  r  a  vile  physician,  blubbing 

The  cafeo  of  his  patient  —  all  for  what? 

To  tit-klo  the  maggot  bora,  in  an  empty  head, 


LEAVES  OF  GRASS  IMPRINTS.  17 

And  wheedle  a  world  that  loves  him  not, 
For  it  is  but  a  world  of  the  dead." 

"Leaves  of  Grass"  is  irreligious,  because  it  springs  from  a 
low  recognition  of  the  nature  of  Deity,  not,  perhaps,  so  in 
intent,  but  really  so  in  its  result.  To  Walt  Whitman,  all  things 
are  alike  good — no  thing  is  better  than  another,  and  thence 
there  is  no  ideal,  no  aspiration,  no>  progress  to  things  better.  It 
is  not  enough  that  all  things  are  good,  all  things  are  equally 
good,  and,  therefore,  there  is  no  order  in  creation  ;  no  better, 
no  worse  —  but  all  is  a  democratic  level,  from  which  can  come 
no  symmetry,  in  which  there  is  no  head,  no  subordination,  no 
system,  and,  of  course,  no  result.  With  a  wonderful  vigor  of 
thought  and  intensity  of  perception,  a  power,  indeed,  not  often 
found,  "  Leaves  of  Grass  "  has  no  ideality,  no  concentration,  no 

Eurpose  —  it  is  barbarous,  undisciplined,  like  the  poetry  of  a 
alf-civilized  people,  and,  as  a  whole,  useless,  save  to  those 
miners  of  thought  who  prefer  the  metal  in  its  unworked  state. 
The  preface  of  "the  book  contains  an  inestimable  wealth  of  this 
unworked  ore  —  it  is  a  creed  of  the  material,  not  denying  the 
ideal,  but  ignorant  of  it : 

"  The  greatest  poet  hardly  knows  pettiness  or  triviality.  If  he  breathes  into 
anything  that  was  before  thought  small,  it  dilates  with  the  grandeur  and  life  of  the 
universe.  He  is  a  seer  ...  he  is  individual  ...  he  is  complete  in  himself  .  .  . 
the  others  are  as  good  as  he,  only  he  sees  it  and  they  do  not.  He  is  not  one  of  the 
chorus  ...  he  does  not  stop  for  any  regulation:  he  is  thepresident  of  regulation. 
What  the  eyesight  does  to  the  rest  he  does  to  the  rest.  Who  knows  the  curious 
mystery  of  the  eyesight?  The  other  senses  corroborate  themselves,  but  this  is 
removed  from  any  proof  but  its  own,  and  foreruns  the  identities  of  the  spiritual 
world.  A  single  glance  of  it  mocks  all  the  investigations  of  man,  and  all  the  instru 
ments  and  books  of  the  earth,  and  all  reasoning.  What  is  marvellous  ?  what  is 
unlikely?  what  is  impossible,  or  baseless,  or  vague?  after  you  have  once  just 
opened  the  space  of  a  peachpit,  and  given  audience  to  far  and  near,  and  to  the  sun 
set,  and  had  all  things  enter  with  electric  swiftness,  softly  and  duly,  without  con 
fusion,  or  jostling,  or  jam. 

"  The  land  and  sea,  the  animals,  fishes,  and  birds,  the  sky  of  heaven  and  the 
orbs,  the  forests,  mountains,  and  rivers,  are  not  small  themes  .  .  .  but  folks 
expect  of  the  poet  to  indicate  more  than  the  beauty  and  dignity  which  always 
attach  to  dumb,  real  objects  .  .  .  they  expect  him  to  indicate  the  path  between 
reality  and  their  souls.  Men  and  women  perceive  the  beauty  well  enough  .  .  . 
probably  as  well  as  he.  The  passionate  tenacity  of  hunters,  woodmen,  early 
risers,  cultivators  of  gardens  and  orchards  and  fields,  the  love  of  healthy  women 
for  the  manly  form,  sea-faring  persons,  drivers  of  horses,  the  passion  for  light  and 
the  open  air,  all  is  an  old  varied  sign  of  the  unfailing  perception  of  beauty,  and  of 
a  residence  of  the  poetic  in  out-door  people.  They  can  never  be  assisted  by  poeta 
to  perceive  .  .  .  some  may,  but  they  never  can.  The  poetic  quality  is  not  mar 
shalled  in  rhyme,  or  uniformity,  or  abstract  addresses  to  things,  nor  in  melancholy 
complaints  or  good  precepts,  but  is  the  life  of  these  and  much  else,  and  is  in  the 
soul.  The  profit  of  rhyme  is  that  it  drops  seeds  of  a  sweeter  and  more  luxuriant 
rhyme;  and  of  uniformity,  that  it  conveys  itself  into  its  own. roots  in  the  ground 
out  of  sight.  The  rhyme  and  xmiformity  of  perfect  poems  show  the  free  growth, 
of  metrical  laws,  and  "bud  from  them  as  unerringly  and  loosely  as  lilacs  or  roses  on 
a  bush,  and  take  shapes  as  compact  as  the  shapes  of  chestnuts,  and  oranges,  and 
melons,  and  pears,  and  shed  the  perfume  impalpable  to  form.  The  fluency  and. 
ornaments  of  the  finest  poems,  or  music,  or  orations,  or  recitations,  are  not  inde 
pendent,  but  dependent.  All  beauty  comes  from  beautiful  blood  and  a  beautiful 
brain.  If  the  greatnesses  are  in  conjunction  in  a  man  or  woman  it  is  enough  *  . 
the  fact  will  prevail  through  the  universe  .  .  .  but  the  gaggery  and  gilt  of  a  million 


18  LEAVES   OF   GKASS   IMPRINTS. 

years  will  not  prevail.    Who  troubles  himself  about  his  ornaments  or  fiuencv  is 
lost." 

41  The  greatest  poet  has  less  a  marked  style,  and  is  more  the  channel  of  thoughts 
and  things  without  increase  or  diminution,  and  is  the  free  channel  of  himself.  lie 
ewears  to  his  art,  I  will  not  be  meddlesome,  I  will  not  have  in  my  writing  any 
elegance,  or  effect,  or  originality,  to  hang  in  the  way  between  me  and  the  rest,like 
curtains.  I  will  have  nothing  hang  in  the  way,  not  the  richest  curtains.  What  I 
tell,  I  tell  for  precisely  what  it  is.  Let  who  may  exalt,  or  startle,  or  fascinate,  or 
soothe,  I  will  have  purposes  as  health,  or  heat,  or  snow,  has,  and  be  as  regardless  of 
observation.  What  I  experience  or  portray  shall  go  from  my  composition  without 
a  shred  of  my  composition.  You  shall  stand  by  my  side,  and  look  in  the  mirror 
with  me." 

44  I  am  of  old  and  young,  of  the  foolish  as  much  as  the  wise, 
Regardless  of  others,  ever  regardful  of  others, 
Maternal  as  well  as  paternal,  a  child  as  well  as  a  man, 
Stuffed  with  the  stuff  that  is  coarse,  and  stuffed  with  the  stuff  that  is  fine, 
One  of  the  great  nation,  the  nation  of  many  nations  —  the  smallest  the  same  and 

the  largest  the  same, 

A  southerner  soon  as  a  northerner,  a  planter  nonchalant  and  hospitable, 
A  Yankee  bound  my  own  way  .  .  .  ready  for  trade  .  .  .  my  joints  the  limber- 

est  joints  on  earth  and  the  sternest  joints  on  earth, 

A  Kentuckian  walking  the  vale  of  the  Elkhorn  in  my  deerskin  leggings, 
A  boatman  over  the  lakes  or  bays  or  along  coasts  ...  a  Hoosier,  a  Badger,  a 

Buckeye, 

A  Louisianian  or  Georgian,  a  poke-easy  from  sandhills  and  pines, 
At  home  on  Kanadian  snow-shoes  or  up  in  the  bush,  or  with  fishermen  off' New 
foundland, 

At  home  in  the  fleet  of  ice-boats,  sailing  with  the  rest  and  tacking, 
At  home  on  the  hills  of  Vermont  or  in  the  woods  of  Maine  or  the  Texan  ranch, 
Comrade  of  Californians  .  .  .  comrade  of  free  northwesterners,  loving  their  big 

proportions, 

Comrade  of  raftsmen  and  coalmen  —  comrade  of  all  who  shake  hands  and  wel 
come  to  drink  and  meat; 

A  learner  with  the  simplest,  a  teacher  of  the  thoughtfullest, 
A  novice  beginning  experient  of  myriads  of  seasons, 
Of  every  hue  and  trade  and  rank,  of  every  caste  and  religion, 
Not  merely  of  the  New  World  but  of  Africa,  Europe  or  Asia  ...  a  wandering 

savage, 

A  farmer,  mechanic,  or  artist,  ...  a  gentleman,  sailor,  lover,  or  quaker, 
A  prisoner,  fancy-man,  rowdy,  lawyer,  physician,  or  priest. 

I  am  he  attesting  sympathy; 

Shall  I  make  my  list  of  things  in  the  house,  and  skip  the  house  that  supports 

them? 

I  am  the  poet  of  common  sense,  and  of  the  demonstrable,  and  of  immortality"; 
And  am  not  the  poet  of  goodness  only  ...  I  do  not  decline  to  be  the  poet  of 

wickedness  also. 

Washes  and  razors  for  foofoos,  .  .  .  for  me  freckles  and  a  bristling  beard. 

What  blurt  is  it  about  virtue  and  about  vice? 

Evil  propels  me,  and  reform  of  evil  propels  me  ...  I  stand  indifferent, 

My  gait  is  no  fault-finder's  or  rejecter's  gait, 

I  moisten  the  roots  of  all  that  has  grown." 

In  other  words,  according  to  Walt  Whitman's  theory,  the  great 
est  poet  is  he  who  performs  the  office  of  camera  to  the  world, 
merely  reflecting  what  he  sees  —  art  is  merely  reproduction. 

Yet  it  cannot  be  denied  that  he  has  felt  the  beauty  of  the 
material  in  full  measure,  and  sometimes  most  felicitously. 

44  A  child  said,  What  is  the  grass?  fetching  it  to  me  with  full  hands; 
How  could  I  answer  the  child?  ...  I  do  not  know  what  it  is  any  more  than  lie. 

I  guess  it  must  be  the  flag  of  my  disposition  out  of  hopeful  green  stuff  woven. 


LEAVES   OP  GRASS   IMPRINTS.  19 

Or  I  guess  it  is  the  handkerchief  of  the  Lord, 
A  scented  gift  and  remembrancer  designedly  dropped, 

Bearing  the  owner's  name  someway  in  the  corners,  that  we  may  see  and  remark, 
and  say,  Whose? 

Or  I  guess  the  grass  is  itself  a  child  .  .  .  the  produced  habe  of  the  vegetation. 

Or  I  guess  it  is  a  uniform  hieroglyphic. 

And  it  means,  Sprouting  alike  in  broad  zones  and  narrow  zones, 

Growing  among  black  folks  as  among  white, 

Kauuck,  Tuckahoe,  Congressmen,  Cuff,  I  give  them  the  same,  I  receive  them 

the  same. 
And  now  it  seems  to  me  the  beautiful  uncut  hair  of  graves. 

The  big  doors  of  the  country -barn  stand  open  and  ready, 

The  dried  grass  of  the  harvest-time  loads  the  slow-drawn  wagon, 

The  clear  light  plays  on  the  brown  gray  and  green  intertinged, 

The  armfuls  are  packed  to  the  sagging  mow; 

I  am  there  ...  I  help  ...  I  came  stretched  atop  of  the  load, 

I  felt  its  soft  jolts  .  .  .  one  leg  reclined  on  the  other, 

I  jump  from  the  crossbeams,  and  seize  the  clover  and  timothy, 

And  roll  head  over  heels,  and  tangle  my  hair  full  of  wisps. 

I  think  I  could  turn  and  live  a  while  with  the  animals  .  .  .  they  arc  so  placid 

and  self-contained, 
I  stand  and  look  at  them  sometimes  half  the  day  long. 

They  do  not  sweat  and  whine  about  their  condition, 

They  do  not  lie  awake  in  the  dark  and  weep  for  their  sins, 

They  do  not  make  me  sick  discussing  their  duty  to  God, 

Not  one  is  dissatisfied  .  .  .  not  one  is  demented  with  the  mania  of  owning 

things, 

Not  one  kneels  to  another  nor  to  his  kind  that  lived  thousands  of  years  ago, 
Not  one  is  respectable  or  industrious  over  the  whole  earth. 

So  they  show  their  relations  to  mo  and  I  accept  them; 

They  bring  me  tokens  of  myself .  .  .  they  evince  them  plainly  in  their  pos 
session. 

When  the  dull  nights  are  over,  and  the  dull  days  also, 

When  the  soreness  of  Iving  so  much  in  bed  is  over, 

When  the  physician,  ai'ter  long  putting  off,  gives  the  silent  and  terrible  look  for 
an  answer, 

When  the  children  come  hurried  and  weeping,  and  the  brothers  and  sisters  have 
been  sent  for, 

When  medicines  stand  unused  on  the  shelf,  and  the  camphor-smell  has  per 
vaded  the  rooms, 

"When  the  faithful  hand  of  the  living  does  not  desert  the  hand  of  the  dying. 

When  the  twitching  lips  press  lightly  on  the  forehead  of  the  dying, 

When  the  breath  ceases  and  the  pulse  of  the  heart  ceases, 

Then  the  corpse-limbs  stretch  on  the  bed,  and  the  living  look  upon  them, 

They  are  palpable  as  the  living  are  palpable. 

The  living  look  upon  the  corpse  with  their  eyesight, 

But  without  eyesight  lingers  a  different  living  and  looks  curiously  on  the  corpse. 

I  knew  a  man,  ...  he  was  a  common  farmer,  ...  he  was  the  father  of  five 
sons,  .  .  .  and  in  them  were  the  fathers  of  eons,  .  .  .  and  in  them  were  the 
fathers  of  sons. 

This  man  was  of  wonderful  vigor  and  calmness  and  beauty  of  person; 

The  shape  of  his  head,  the  richness  and  breadth  of  his  manners,  the  pale  yellow 
and  white  of  his  hair  and  beard,  the  immeasurable  meaning  of  his  black 
eyes, 

These  I  used  to  go  and  visit  him  to  see.  .  .  .  He  was  wise  also, 

He  was  six  feet  tall,  ...  he  was  over  eighty  years  old,  .  .  .  his  sons  were  mas 
sive,  clean,  bearded,  tanfaced,  and  handsome, 

They  and  his  daughters  loved  him,  ...  all  who  saw  him  loved  him,  .  .  .  .they 
did  not  love  him  by  allowance,  .  .  .  they  loved  him  with  personal  love; 


20  LEAVES   OP  GRASS   IMPRINTS. 

He  drank  water  only,  ...  the  blood  shone  like  scarlet  through  the  clear  brown 

skin  of  his  face; 
He  was  a  frequent  gunner  and  fisher,  .  .  .  he  sailed  his  boat  himself,  .  .  .  he  had 

a  line  one  presented  to  him  by  n  shipjoiner,  ...  he  had  fowling  pieces, 

presented  to  him  by  men  that  loved  him; 
When  he  went  with  his  five  sons  and  many  grandsons  to  hunt  or  fish  you  would 

pick  him  out  as  the  most  beautiful  and  vigorous  of  the  gang, 
You  would  wish  long  and  long  to  be  with  him,  .  .  .  you  would  wish  to  sit  by 

him  in  the  boat  that  you  and  he  might  touch  each  other." 

It  is  not  possible  to  compare  the  feverish,  dying  sentiment  of 
Tennyson,  dying  from  false  indulgence,  to  the  rude,  vigorous, 
and  grand  if  chaotic  thought  of  Walt  Whitman,  imperfect  only 
from  want  of  development — the  poems  are  alike  maimed,  but 
one  from  loss  of  parts,  the  other  from  not  yet  having  attained 
its  parts.  But  still  they  are  the  extremes  — truth  lies  between 
them  always.  What  if  Columbus  had  sailed  round  the  world, 
and  made  its  extremes  meet  ?  He  would  only  have  been  back 
in  Spain  again  —  the  true  end  of  his  voyage  was  midway. 


From  the  New  York  Daily  Times,  (1856.) 
LEAVES  OF  GRASS,  —  Brooklyn,  N.  Y.  — 1856. 

What  Centaur  have  we  here,  half  man,  half  beast,  neighing 
defiance  to  all  the  world  ?  What  conglomerate  of  thought  is 
this  before  us,  with  insolence,  philosophy,  tenderness,  blasphe 
my,  beauty  and  gross  indecency  tumbling  in  drunken  confusion 
through  the  pages  ?  Who  is  this  arrogant  young  man  who  pro 
claims  himself  the  Poet  of  the  Time,  and  who  roots  like  a  pig 
among  a  rotten  garbage  of  licentious  thoughts  ?  Who  is  this 
flushed  and  full-blooded  lover  of  Nature  who  studies  her  so 
affectionately,  and  who  sometimes  utters  her  teachings  with  a 
lofty  tongue  ?  This  mass  of  extraordinary  contradictions,  this 
fool  and  this  wise  man,  this  lover  of  beauty  and  this  sunken 
sensualist,  this  original  thinker  and  blind  egotist,  is  Mr.  WALT 
WHITMAN,  author  of  Leaves  of  Grass,  and,  according  to  his 
own  account,  "  a  Kosmos." 

Some  time  since  there  was  left  at  the  office  of  this  paper  a 
thin  quarto  volume  bound  in  green  and  gold.  On  opening  the 
book  we  first  beheld,  as  a  frontispiece,  the  picture  of  a  man  in 
his  shirt  sleeves,  wearing  an  expression  of  settled  arrogance 
upon  his  countenance.  We  next  arrived  at  a  title  page  of  mag 
nificent  proportions,  with  letter-press  at  least  an  inch  and  a  half 
in  length.  From  this  title  page  we  learned  that  the  book  was 
entitled  Leaves  of  Grass,  and  was  printed  at  Brooklyn  in  the 
year  1855.  This  inspected,  we  passed  on  to  what  seemed  to  be 
a  sort  of  preface,  only  that  it  had  no  beginning,  was  remarkable 
for  a  singular  sparseness  in  the  punctuation,  and  was  broken  up 
in  a  confusing  manner  by  frequent  rows  of  dots  separating  the 


LEAVES  OP  GRASS   IMPRINTS.  21 

paragraphs.  To  this  succeeded  eighty-two  pages  of  what  ap 
peared  at  the  first  glance  to  be  a  number  of  prose  sentences 
printed  somewhat  after  a  biblical  fashion.  Almost  at  the  first 
page  we  opened  we  lighted  upon  the  confession  that  the  author 
was 

"WALT  WHITMAN,  an  American,  one  of  the  roughs, 

a  Kosmos, 
Disorderly,  fleshy  and  sensual . . . . " 

This  was  sufficient  basis  for  a  theory.  We  accordingly  arrived 
at  the  conclusion  that  the  insolent-looking  young  man  on  the 
frontispiece  was  this  same  WALT  WHITMAN,  and  author  of  the 
Leaves  of  Grass. 

Then  returning  to  the  fore-part  of  the  book,  we  found  proof 
slips  of  certain  review  articles  written  about  the  Leaves  of  Grass. 
One  of  these  purported  to  be  extracted  from  a  periodical  entitled 
the  United  States  Review,  the  other  was  headed  "From  the 
American  Phrenological  Journal"  These  were  accompanied 
by  a  printed  copy  of  an  extravagant  letter  of  praise  addressed 
by  Mr.  RALPH  WALDO  EMERSON  to  Mr.  WALT  WHITMAN, 
complimenting  him  on  the  benefaction  conferred  on  society  in 
the  present  volume.  On  subsequently  comparing  the  critiques 
from  the  United  States  Review  and  the  Phrenological  Journal 
with  the  preface  of  the  Leaves  of  Grass,  we  discovered  unmis 
takable  internal  evidence  that  Mr.  WALT  WHITMAN,  true  to 
his  character  as  a  Kosmos,  was  not  content  with  writing  a  book, 
but  was  also  determined  to  review  it ;  so  Mr.  WALT  WHITMAN, 
had  concocted  both  those  criticisms  of  his  own  work,  treating 
it  we  need  not  say  how  favorably.  This  little  discovery  of  our 
"  disorderly  "  acquaintance's  mode  of  proceeding  rather  damped 
any  enthusiasm  with  which  Mr.  EMERSON'S  extravagant  letter 
may  have  inspired  us.  We  reflected,  here  is  a  man  who  sets 
himself  up  as  the  poet  and  teacher  of  his  time  ;  who  professes  a 
scorn  of  everything  mean  and  dastardly  and  double-faced,  who 
hisses  with  scorn  as  he  passes  one  in  the  street  whom  he  sus 
pects  of  the  taint,  hypocrisy — yet  this  self-contained  teacher, 
this  rough-and-ready  scorner  of  dishonesty,  this  rowdy  knight- 
errant  who  tilts  against  all  lies  and  shams,  himself  perpetrates 
a  lie  and  a  sham  at  the  very  outset  of  his  career.  It  is  a  lie  to 
write  a  review  of  one's  own  book,  then  extract  it  from  the  work 
in  which  it  appeared  and  send  it  out  to  the  world  as  an  impartial 
editorial  utterance.  It  is  an  act  that  the  most  degraded  helot  of 
literature  might  blush  to  commit.  It  is  a  dishonesty  committed 
against  one's  own  nature,  and  all  the  world.  Mr.  WALT  WHIT 
MAN  in  one  of  his  candid  rhapsodies  announces  that  he  is  "  no 
more  modest  than  immodest."  Perhaps  in  literary  matters  he 
carries  the  theory  farther,  and  is  no  more  honest  than  dishon 
est.  He  likewise  says  in  his  preface :  "  The  great  poets  are 
known  by  the  absence  in  them  of  tricks,  and  by  the  justification 


22  LEAVES   OF   GRASS   IMPRINTS. 

of  perfect  personal  candor."  Where,  then,  can  we  place  Mr. 
WALT  WHITMAN'S  claims  upon  immortality? 

We  confess  we  turn  from  Mr.  WHITMAN  as  Critic,  to  Mr. 
WHITMAN  as  Poet,  with  considerable  pleasure.  We  prefer  oc 
cupying  that  independent  position  which  Mr.  WHITMAN  claims 
for  man,  and  forming  our  own  opinions,  rather  than  swallowing 
those  ready-made.  This  gentleman  begins  his  poetic  life  with 
a  coarse  and  bitter  scorn  of  the  past.  We  have  been  living  stale 
and  unprofitable  lives ;  we  have  been  surfeited  with  luxury  and 
high  living,  and  are  grown  lethargic  and  dull ;  the  age  is  fast 
decaying,  when,  lo  !  the  trump  of  the  Angel  Whitman  brings 
the  dead  to  life,  and  animates  the  slumbering  world.  If  we 
obey  the  dictates  of  that  trumpet,  we  will  do  many  strange 
things.  We  will  fling  off  all  moral  clothing  and  walk  naked 
over  the  earth.  We  will  disembarrass  our  language  of  all  the 
proprieties  of  speech,  and  talk  indecency  broadcast.  We  will 
act  in  short  as  if  the  Millenium  were  arrived  in  this  our  present 
day,  when  the  absence  of  all  vice  would  no  longer  necessitate  a 
virtuous  discretion.  We  fear  much,  Mr.  WALT  WHITMAN,  that 
the  time  is  not  yet  come  for  the  nakedness  of  purity.  We  are 
not  yet  virtuous  enough  to  be  able  to  read  your  poetry  aloud  to 
our  children  and  our  wives.  What  might  be  pastoral  simplicity 
five  hundred  years  hence,  would  perhaps  be  stigmatized  as  the 
coarsest  indecency  now,  and  —  we  regret  to  think  that  you  have 
spoken  too  soon. 

The  adoration  of  the  " Me,"  the  "Ego,"  the  "eternal  and 
universal  I,"  to  use  the  jargon  of  the  Boston  Oracle,  is  the  pre 
vailing  motive  of  Leaves  of  Grass.  Man  embraces  and  compre 
hends  the  whole.  He  is  everything,  and  everything  is  him. 
All  nature  ebbs  and  flows  through  him  in  ceaseless  tides.  He 
is  "  his  own  God  and  his  own  Devil,"  and  everything  that  he 
does  is  good.  He  rejoices  with  all  who  rejoice  ;  suffers  with  all 
who  suffer.  This  doctrine  is  exemplified  in  the  book  by  a  pano 
rama  as  it  were  of  pictures,  each  of  which  is  shared  in  by  the 
author,  who  belongs  to  the  universe,  as  the  universe  belongs  to 
him.  In  detailing^hese  pictures  he  hangs  here  and  there  shreds 
and  tassels  of  his  wild  philosophy,  till  his  work,  like  a  maniac's 
robe,  is  bedizened  with  fluttering  tags  of  a  thousand  colors. 
With  all  his  follies,  insolence,  and  indecency,  no  modern  poet 
that  we  know  of  has  presented  finer  descriptive  passages  than 
Mr.  WALT  WHITMAN.  His  phrasing,  and  the  strength  and 
completeness  of  his  epithets,  are  truly  wonderful.  He  paints 
in  a  single  line  with  marvellous  power  and  comprehensiveness. 
The  following  rhapsody  will  illustrate  his  fulness  of  epithet: 

"  I  am  he  that  walks  with  the  tender  and  growing  night; 
I  call  to  the  earth  and  sea,  half  held  by  the  night. 

*'  Frees  close  bare-bosomed  night  1  Press  close  magnetic,  nourishing  nightl 
Night  of  South  winds  I  Night  of  the  large  few  stars! 
Still  nodding  nightl  Mad,  naked,  Summer  nightl 


LEAVES   OF   GRASS   IMPRINTS.  23 

*  Smile,  O  voluptuous  cool-breathed  earth! 
Earth  of  the  slumbering  and  liquid  trees! 
Earth  of  departed  sunset  I  Earth  of  the  mountains  misty-toptf 
Earth  of  the  vitreous  pour  of  the  full  moon  just  tinged  with  blue  !' 
Earth  of  shine  and  dark,  mottling  the  tide  of  the  river! 
Earth  of  the  limpid  gray  of  clouds  brighter  and  clearer  for  my  sake  I 
Far-swooping  elbowed  earth .'    Rich  apple-blossomed  earth  I 
Smile,  for  your  lover  comes! 

**  You  sea !    I  resign  myself  to  you  also  ....  I  guess  what  you  mean, 
I  behold  from  the  beach  your  crooked  inviting  fingers, 
I  believe  you  refuse  to  go  buck  without  feeling  of  me; 
We  must  have  a  turn  together  ....  I  undress  ....  hurry  me  out  of  sight  of  the 

land. 

Cushion  me  soft ....  rock  me  in  billowy  drowse, 
Dash  me  with  amorous  wet. ...  I  can  repay  you. 

"  Sea  of  stretched  ground-swells! 
Sea,  breathing  broad  and  convulsive  breaths  I 

Sea  of  the  brine  of  life!    Sea  of  unshovelled  and  always  ready  graves  ! 
Howler  and  scoqper  of  storms  !  Capricious  and  dainty  sea! 
I  am  integral  with  you  ....  I  too  am  of  one  phase  and  of  all  phases." 

Here  are  fine  expressions  well  placed.  Mr.  WHITMAN'S 
study  of  nature  has  been  close  and  intense.  He  has  expressed 
certain  things  better  than  any  other  man  who  has  gone  before 
him.  He  talks  well,  and  largely,  and  tenderly  of  sea  and  sky, 
and  men  and  trees,  and  women  and  children.  His  observation 
and  his  imagination  are  both  large  and  well-developed.  Take 
this  picture  ;  how  pathetic,  how  tenderly  touched  ! 

"  Agonies  are  one  of  my  changes  of  garments; 
I  do  not  ask  the  wounded   person  how  he  feels  ....  I  myself  become  the 

wounded  person, 
My  hurt  turns  livid  upon  me  as  I  lean  on  a  cane  and  observe. 

"I  am  the  mashed  fireman  with  breast-bone  broken  ....  tumbling  walls  buried 

me  in  their  debris, 

Heat  and  smoke  I  inspired  ....  I  heard  the  yelling  shouts  of  my  comrades, 
I  heard  the  distant  click  of  their  picks  and  shovels; 
They  have  cleared  the  beams  away  ....  they  tenderly  lift  me  forth. 

"  I  lie  in  the  night  air  in  my  red  ehirt ....  the  pervading  hush  is  for  my  sake, 
Painless  after  all  I  lie,  exhausted  but  not  so  unhappy. 
"White  and  beautiful  are  the  faces  around  me  ....  the  heads  are  bared  of  their 

fire-caps. 
The  kneeling  crowd  fades  with  the  light  of  the  torches." 

If  it  were  permitted  to  us  to  outrage  all  precedent,  and  print 
that  which  should  not  be  printed,  we  could  cull  some  passages 
from  the  "  Leaves  of  Grass,"  and  place  them  in  strange  con 
trast  with  the  extracts  we  have  already  made.  If  being  a  Kos- 
mos  is  to  set  no  limits  to  one's  imagination;  to  use  coarse  epi 
thets  when  coarseness  is  not  needful ;  to  roam  like  a  drunken 
satyr,  with  inflamed  blood,  through  every  field  of  lascivious 
thought;  to  return  time  after  time  with  a  seemingly  exhaus^r 
less  prurient  pleasure  to  the  same  licentious  phrases  and  ideas, 
and  to  jumble  all  this  up  with  bits  of  marvellously  beautiful  de 
scription,  exquisite  touches  of  nature,  fragments  of  savagely- 
uttered  truth,  shreds  of  unleavened  philosophy ;  if  to  do  all  this 
is  to  be  a  Kosmos,  then  indeed  we  cede  to  Mr.  WALT  WHITMAN 


24  LEAVES   OF  GRASS  IMPRINTS. 

his  arrogated  title.  Yet  it  seems  to  us  that  one  may  he  profound 
without  being  beastly ;  one  may  teach  philosophy  without  cloth 
ing  it  in  slang ;  one  may  be  a  great  poet  without  using  a  lan 
guage  which  shall  outlaw  the  minstrel  from  every  decent  hearth. 
Mr.  WALT  WHITMAN  does  not  think  so.  He  tears  the  veil  from 
all  that  society  by  a  well-ordered  law  shrouds  in  a  decent  mys 
tery.  He  is  proud  of  his  nakedness  of  speech ;  he  glories  in  his 
savage  scorn  of  decorum.  Like  the  priests  of  Belus,  he  wreathes 
around  his  brow  the  emblems  of  the  Phallic  worship. 

With  all  this  muck  of  abomination  soiling  the  pages,  there  is 
a  woriarous,  unaccountable  fascination  about  the  Leaves  of 
Grass.  As  we  read  it  again  and  again,  and  we  will  confess 
that  we  have  returned  to  it  often,  a  singular  order  seems  to  arise 
out  of  its  chaotic  verses.  Out  of  the  mire  and  slough  edged 
thoughts  and  keen  philosophy  start  suddenly,  as  the  men  of 
Cadmus  sprang  from  the  muddy  loam.  A  lofty  purpose  still 
dominates  the  uncleanness  and  the  ridiculous  self-conceit  in 
which  the  author,  led  astray  by  ignorance,  indulges.  He  gives 
token  everywhere  that  he  is  a  huge  uncultivated  thinker.  No 
country  save  this  could  have  given  birth  to  the  man.  His  mind 
is  Western  —  brawny,  rough,  and  original.  Wholly  unculti 
vated,  and  beyond  his  associates,  he  has  begotten  within  him 
the  egotism  of  intellectual  solitude.  Had  he  mingled  with 
scholars  and  men  of  intellect,  those  effete  beings  whom  he  so 
despises,  he  would  have  learned  much  that  would  have  been 
beneficial.  When  we  have  none  of  our  own  size  to  measure 
ourselves  with,  we  are  apt  to  fancy  ourselves  broader  and  taller 
than  we  are.  The  poet  of  the  little  country  town,  who  has 
reigned  for  years  the  Virgil  or  Anacreon  of  fifty  square  miles, 
finds,  when  he  comes  into  the  great  metropolis,  that  he  has  not 
had  all  the  thinking  to  himself.  There  he  finds  hundreds  of  men 
who  have  thought  the  same  things  as  himself,  and  uttered  them 
more  fully.  He  is  astonished  to  discover  that  his  intellectual 
language  is  limited,  when  he  thought  that  he  had  fathomed 
expression.  He  finds  his  verse  unpolished,  his  structure  defec 
tive,  his  best  thoughts  said  before.  He  enters  into  the  strife, 
clashes  with  his  fellows,  measures  swords  with  this  one,  gives 
thrust  for  thrust  with  the  other,  until  his  muscles  harden  and 
his  frame  swells.  He  looks  back  upon  his  provincial  intellec 
tual  existence  with  a  smile ;  he  laughs  at  his  country  arrogance 
and  ignorant  faith  in  himself.  Now  we  gather  from  Mr.  WHIT 
MAN'S  own  admissions  —  admissions  that  assume  the  form  of 
boasts  —  that  he  has  mingled  but  little  with  intellectual  men. 
l^ie  love  of  the  physical  —  which  is  the  key-note  of  his  entire 
book  —  has  as  yet  altogether  satisfied  him.  To  mix  with  large- 
limbed,  clean-skinned  men,  to  look  on  ruddy,  fair-proportioned 
women,  is  his  highest  social  gratification.  This  love  of  the 
beautiful  is  by  him  largely  and  superbly  expressed  in  many 


LEAVES   OP   GRASS   IMPRINTS.  25 

places,  and  it  does  one  good  to  read  those  passages  pulsating 
with  the  pure  blood  of  animal  life.  But  those  associates,  though 
manly  and  handsome,  help  but  little  to  a  man's  inner  apprecia 
tion  of  himself.  Perhaps  our  author  among  his  comrades  had 
no  equal  in  intellectual  force.  He  reigned  triumphantly  in  an 
unquestioning  circle  of  admirers.  How  easy,  then,  to  fancy 
one's  self  a  wonderful  being !  How  easy  to  look  around  and 
say,  "  There  are  none  like  me  here.  I  am  the  coming  man  !  " 
It  may^be  said  that  books  will  teach  such  a  man  the  existence 
of  other  powerful  minds,  but  this  will  not  do.  Such  communion 
is  abstract,  and  has  but  little  force.  It  is  only  in  the  actual  com 
bat  of  mind  striving  with  mind  that  a  man  comes  properly  to 
estimate  himself.  Mr.  WHITMAN  has  grown  up  in  an  intellec 
tual  isolation  which  has  fully  developed  all  the  eccentricities  of 
his  nature.  He  has  made  some  foolish  theory  that  to  be  rough 
is  to  be  original.  Now,  external  softness  of  manner  is  in  no 
degree  incompatible  with  muscularity  of  intellect ;  and  one 
thinks  no  more  of  a  man's  brains  for  his  treading  on  one's  toes 
without  an  apology,  or  his  swearing  in  the  presence  of  women. 
When  Mr.  WHITMAN  shall  have  learned  that  a  proper  worship 
of  the  individual  man  need  not  be  expressed  so  as  to  seern  inso 
lence,  and  that  men  are  not  to  be  bullied  into  receiving  as  a 
Messiah  every  man  who  sneers  at  them  in  his  portrait,  and  dis 
gusts  them  in  his  writings,  we  have  no  doubt  that  in  some  chas 
tened  mood  of  mind  he  will  produce  moving  and  powerful  books. 
We  select  some  passages  exhibiting  the  different  phases  of  Mr. 
WHITMAN'S  character.  We  do  so  more  readily  as,  from  the 
many  indecencies  contained  in  Leaves  of  Grass,  we  do  not  be 
lieve  it  will  find  its  wayv  into  many  families. 

A  MODEST  PROFESSION  OF  FAIIH. 

"Nothing,  not  God,  is  greater  to  one  than  one's  self  is, 
And  whoever  walks  a  furlong  without  sympathy,  walks  to  his  own  funeral, 
Dressed  in  his  shroud." 

A  FINE   LANDSCAPE. 

"  The  turbid  pool  that  lies  in  the  Autumn  forest, 
The  moon  that  descends  the  steeps  of  the  soughing  twilight, 
Toss,  sparkles  of  day  and  dusk  ....  toss  on  the  black  stems  that  decay  in  tbo 

muck; 
Toss  to  the  moaning  gibberish  of  the  dry  limbs." 

A  TRUTH. 

*'  I,  too,  am  not  a  bit  tamed  ....  I,  too,  am  untranslatable; 
I  sound  my  barbaric  yawp  over  the  roofs  of  the  world." 

A  DEATH-BED. 

"  When  the  dull  nights  are  over,  and  the  dull  days  also ; 
When  the  soreness  of  lying  so  much  in  bed  is  over, 
When  the  physician,  after  long  putting  off,  gives  the  silent  and  terrible  look  for 

an  answer; 
When  the  children  come  hurried  and  weeping,  and  the  brothers  and  sisters 

have  been  sent  for; 
When  medicines  stand  unused  on  the  shelf,  and  the  camphxxr-smell  has 

pervaded  the  rooms; 


26  LEAVES   OF  GRASS   IMPRINTS. 

When  the  faithful  hand  of  the  living  does  not  desert  the  hand  of  the  dying; 

When  the  twitching  lips  press  lightly  on  the  forehead  of  the  dying; 

When  the  breath  ceases,  and  the  pulse  of  the  heart  ceases; 

Then  the  corpse  limbs  stretch  on  the  bed,  and  the  living  look  upon  them, 

They  are  palpable  as  the  living  are  palpable. 

The  living  look  upon  the  corpse  with  their  eye-sight, 

But  without  eye-sight  lingers  a  different  living  and  looks  curiously  on  the  corpse" 

IMMORTALITY. 

'  If  maggots  and  rats  ended  us,  then  suspicion,  and  treachery  and  death. 
Do  you  suspect  death?    If  I  were  to  suspect  death  I  should  die  now. 
Do  you  think  I  could  walk  pleasantly  and  well-suited  towards  annihilation  ?  " 

THE   REVOLUTION  OF  1848. 

"  Yet  behind  all,  lo,  a  shape, 

Vague  as  the  night,  draped  interminably,  head,  front  and  form  in  scarlet  folds, 
Whose  face  and  eyes  none  may  see, 

Out  of  its  robes  only  this  ....  the  red  robes  lifted  by  the  arm, 
One  finger  pointed  high  over  the  top,  like  the  head  of  a  snake  appears. 

"  Meanwhile  corpses  lie  in  new-made  graves  ....  bloody  corpses  of  young  men: 
The  rope  of  the  gibbet,  hangs  heavily  ----  the  bullets  of  princes  are  flying  .... 

the  creatures  of  power  laugh  aloud. 
And  all  these  things  bear  fruits  ....  and  they  are  good. 
"  Those  corpses  of  young  men, 
Those  martyrs  that  hang  from  the  gibbets  ....  those  hearts  pierced  by  the  gray 

lead, 

Cold  and    motionless  as  they  seem  ....  live  elsewhere  with  unslaughtered 
vitality. 


"  They  live  in  other  young  men,  O  Kings, 
They  live  in  brothers  again  ready  to  defy  you; 
They  were  purified  by  death  ....  they  were  taught  and  exalted. 


"Not  a  grave  of  the  murdered  for  freedom  but  sows  seed  for  freedom  ....  in  its 

turn  to  bear  seed, 

Which  the  winch  carry  afar  and  resow,  and  ihe  rain*  and  the  snows  nourish; 
Not  a  disembodied  spirit  can  the  weapons  of  tyrants  let  loose, 
But  it  stalks  invisibly  o'er  the  earth  ....  whispering,  counselling,  cautioning.'0 

Since  the  foregoing  was  written  —  and  it  has  been  awaiting 
its  turn  at  the  printing  press  some  months  —  Mr.  WALT  WHIT 
MAN  has  published  an  enlarged  edition  of  his  works,  from  which 
it  is  fair  to  infer  that  his  first  has  had  a  ready  sale.  From 
twelve  poems,  of  which  the  original  book  was  composed,  he  has 
brought  the  number  up  to  thirty,  all  characterized  by  the  same 
wonderful  amalgamation  of  beauty  and  indecency.  He  has, 
however,  been  in  his  new  edition  guilty  of  a  fresh  immodesty. 
He  has  not  alone  printed  Mr.  EMERSON'S  private  letter  in  an 
appendix,  but  he  has  absolutely  printed  a  passage  of  that  gen 
tleman's  note,  "  I  greet  you  at  the  beginning  of  a  great  career," 
in  gold  letters  on  the  back,  and  affixed  the  name  of  the  writer. 
Now,  Mr.  EMERSON  wrote  a  not  very  wise  letter  to  Mr.  WHIT 
MAN  on  the  publication  of  the  first  twelve  poems  —  indorsing 
them  ;  and  so  there  might  be  some  excuse  for  the  poet's  anxiety 
to  let  the  public  know  that  his  first  edition  was  commended 
from  such  a  quarter.  But  with  the  additional  poems,  Mr.  EM 
ERSON  has  certainly  nothing  whatever  to  do  ;  nevertheless,  the 
same  note  that  indorsed  the  twelve  is  used  by  Mr.  WHITMAN 
in  the  coolest  manner  to  indorse  the  thirty-two.  This  is  making 


LEAVES   OF  GRASS   IMPRINTS.  27 

a  private  letter  go  very  far  indeed.  It  is  as  if  after  a  man 
signed  a  deed,  the  person  interested  should  introduce  a  number 
of  additional  clauses,  making  the  original  signature  still  cover 
them.  It  is  a  literary  fraud,  and  Mr.  WHITMAN  ought  to  be 
ashamed  of  himself. 

Still,  this  man  has  brave  stuff  in  him.  He  is  truly  astonish 
ing.  The  originality  of  his  philosophy  is  of  little  account,  for 
if  it  is  truth,  it  must  be  ever  the  same,  whether  uttered  by  his 
lips  or  PLATO'S.  In  manner  only  can  we  be  novel,  and  truly 
Mr.  WHITMAN  is  novelty  itself.  Since  the  greater  portion  of 
this  review  was  written,  we  confess  to  having  been  attracted 
again  and  again  to  Leaves  of  Grass.  It  has  a  singular  electric 
attraction.  Its  manly  vigor,  its  brawny  health,  seem  to  incite 
and  satisfy.  We  look  forward  with  curious  anticipation  to  Mr. 
WALT  WHITMAN'S  future  works. 


A  LETTER  IMPROMPTU. 
MY  DEAR  MR. 


But  you  have  a  native  in  Brooklyn,  a  poet,  fire-eyed  and  large- 
hearted, 

Who  belongs  to  the  ancient  and  elder,  the  rough-hewn,  real 
immortals  — 

Those  wise  old  gods,  whose  faces  laugh  out  in  the  red  light  of 
morning, 

The  fresh,  dewy  light  of  the  morning,  when  man  was  youthful, 
and  nature ; 

He,  Walt  Whitman,  a  "  rough,"  old  Cosmos,  primeval  diurnal, 

Unwieldy  as  any  Behemoth,  trampling  mud-swamps  Nilotic, 

Though  trampling  to  life  the  Lotus,  and  wise  old  serpent  of 

Egypt ; 

Graceful  as  fawns  and  panthers,  full  of  the  marrow  of  ripe  men, 
Luscious  as  grapes  and  roses,  with  thoughts  like  the  breath  of 

the  violet, 

He,  the  fresh  comer,  new  speaker,  trying  no  scholars'  hex 
ameters, 
Has  faith  that  the  prose-tongue  can  serve  him,  and  seizing  the 

rough  words, 

Such  as  he  finds  them  spoken  by  brother  and  sister  Manhattans, 
Sets  them  to  sweeter  arid  deeper  music  than  ears  heard  afore 
time  ; 
This  is  the  man  and  the  measure  dearer  to  me  than  all  others, 

Dearer    by   far    than    ,   than    mongrel   musical 

singers,  — 


28  LEAVES   OF   GRASS   IMPRINTS. 

He  is  not  afraid  —  Walt  Whitman  —  to  speak  the  things  that 

he  thinketh, 
To  speak  of  himself  and  his  feelings,  his  innermost,  privatest 

feelings. 
Poet,  and  soul  representative,  knows  that  he  stands  for  his 

fellows ; 
Knows  that  the  person  is  sacred,  the  person,  the  passions,  the 

organs. 

Is  not  afraid  to  sing  of  the  love  of  a  man  for  a  woman  ; 
Daring,  he  lifts  up  the  veil,  exposing  the  wonderful  process ; 
Sings  of  its  rosy-lipped  kisses,  its  ravishing  surfeiting  blisses, 
The  storm  of  its  rapture  and  madness,  the  prostrate  repose  of 

its  calm. 
Careth   he   naught   for  the   saints,  careth  he  naught  for  the 

sinners. 

He  is  a  saint  and  a  sinner  —  a  man  with  his  feelings  about  him  ; 
Alive  in  the  world  of  to-day  —  not  to  be  shuffled  nor  cheated 
Out  of  his  rights  as  a  man,  out  of  his  loves  for  a  woman. 
•  Sees  nothing  common  about  him,  nothing  that  is  not  poetic ; 
Sees  in  the  shops  of  the  city  —  the  trade,  the  commerce,  the 

caucus, 

Sees  in  the  everyday  life  of  worker,  dandy,  and  loafer, 
Mysterious  things  and  dramatic,  wonder-worlds  lying  beneath 

them. 

Is  not  ashamed  of  mechanics  as  friends  of  his  and  companions. 
This  is  the  new  Yankee  poet,  this  is  the  man  for  my  money ! 
Who  in  his  box  of  a  body  carries  the  race  and  its  burdens, 
Its    joys,  its   sorrows  and    laughters,   its   antics,   follies   and 

wisdom ; 
Carries    the  wealth  of   its   towns,   its    arts,   its    science   and 

knowledge, 
Carries  the  love  of  the   sexes,  the  beauty   of  God  and  the 

universe. 

So  I  call  to  all  Yankee-land,  Come  up  and  see  your  new  poet ! 
He  who  has  broke  from  the  temple,  broke  from  the  old  Eastern 

temple, 

Trampled  the  fire  of  its  altars  —  leaving  its  albs  and  its  crosiers, 
Its  cowls  and  garlands  and  song  robes,  standing  here  in  the 

West-land, 

Free  as  the  forest  winds,  and  bold  as  the  Rocky  Mountains, 
Clad  in  the  robes  of  the  prairies  —  seeking  to  build  up  a  new 

one. 
Him  with   his  perfect  faith,  and  his  wild,  barbaric  "yawps" 

which  he 
Flings  with  an  ominous  thunder  over  the  "  roofs  "  of  the  Old 

World, 
Him  seeks  the  Western  genius  seized  for  the  first  time  in 

earnest, 


LEAVES   OF   GRASS    IMPRINTS.  29 

Making  him  "landlord  and  sealord,  airlord,"  and  starlord  and 

master  : 

Such  as  I  think  him  's  Walt  "Whitman  —  "Walt  "Whitman,  essen 
tially  Walt ! 
Not  such  as  at  present  he  shows  him  in  his  wonderful  "  Grass 

Leaves." 

For  this  is  the  grand  epileptic  oracular  outburst  he  utters, 
In  the  first  grip  of  the  god  taking  possession  within  him. 
But  if  he  be  true  to  himself,  to  the  god,  and  to  art,  our  divinest 
Symbol  of  meaning  and  beauty  which  man  has  discovered  in 

this  world, 
He  is  the  Titan  you  speak  of,  out  of  whose  loins  there  shall 

issue 

The  fiery  brood  of  Americans,  running  their  errands  of  love  up 
The  sides  of  the  high  western  mountains  —  greatest  of  men 

and  of  heroes  ! 

But  pray  do  not  think  I  despise  the 

Nor  yet  the  young  lady  hexameters,  of  mongrel  musical  singers. 

I  see  from  what  depths  it  proceedeth  — the 

I    see    in    what    shallows    it    runneth  —  the    musical    babble 

of 

I  'm  thankful  for  something  in  one  case ;  thankful  for  nothing 

in  t'  other. 
Chekea,  Mass.,  1857.  JANUARY  SEARLE. 


From  the.  London  Weekly  Dispatch.    (London,  England,  1856.) 
LEAVES  OF  GRASS.  By  Walt  Whitman.   Horsell,  Oxford  Street. 

We  have  before  us  one  of  the  most  extraordinary  specimens 
of  Yankee  intelligence  and  American  eccentricity  in  author 
ship  it  is  possible  to  conceive.  It  is  of  a  genus  so  peculiar  as 
to  embarass  us,  and  has  an  air  at  once  so  novel,  so  audacious, 
and  so  strange,  as  to  verge  upon  absurdity,  and  yet  it  would 
be  an  injustice  to  pronounce  it  so,  as  the  work  is  saved  from 
this  extreme  by  a  certain  mastery  over  diction  not  very  easy  of 
definition.  What  Emerson  has  pronounced  to  be  good  must 
not  be  lightly  treated,  and  before  we  pronounce  upon  the  mer 
its  of  this  performance  it  is  but  right  to  examine  them.  We 
have,  then,  a  series  of  pithy  prose  sentences  strung  together  — 
forming  twelve  grand  divisions  in  all,  but  which,  having  a  rude 
rhythmical  cadence  about  them,  admit  of  the  designation  poet 
ical  being  applied.  They  are  destitute  of  rhyme,  measure  of 
feet,  and  the  like,  every  condition  under  which  poetry  is  gener 
ally  understood  to  exist  being  absent ;  but  in  their  strength  of 
expression,  their  fervor,  hearty  wholesomeness,  their  original 
ity,  mannerism,  and  freshness,  one  finds  in  them  a  singular  har- 


30  LEAVES   OP   GRASS   IMPRINTS. 

mony  and  flow,  as  if  by  reading,  they  gradually  formed  them 
selves  into  melody,  and  adopted  characteristics  peculiar  and 
appropriate  to  themselves  alone.  If,  however,  some  sentences 
be  tine,  there  are  others  altogether  laughable ;  nevertheless,  in 
the  bare  strength,  the  unhesitating  frankness  of  a  man  who  "  be 
lieves  in  the  flesh  and  the  appetites,"  and  who  dares  to  call  sim 
plest  things  by  their  plainest  names,  conveying  also  a  large 
sense  of  the  beautiful,  and  with  an  emphasis  which  gives  a 
clearer  conception  of  what  manly  modesty  really  is  than  any 
thing  we  have,  in  all  conventional  forms  of  word,  deed,  or  act 
so  far  known  of,  that  we  rid  ourselves,  little  by  little,  of  the 
strangeness  with  which  we  greet  this  bluff  new-comer,  and  be 
ginning  to  understand  him  better,  appreciate  him  in  proportion 
as  he  becomes  more  known.  He  will  soon  make  his  way  into 
the  confidence  of  his  readers,  and  his  poems  in  time  will  become 
a  pregnant  text-book,  out  of  which  quotations  as  sterling  as  the 
minted  gold  will  be  taken  and  applied  to  every  form  and  phase 
of  the  "  inner  "  or  the  "  outer  "  life  ;  and  we  express  our  pleas 
ure  in  making  the  acquaintance  of  Walt  Whitman,  hoping  to 
know  more  of  him  in  time  to  come. 


From  the  Brooklyn  Daily  Times.    Q856.) 
LEAVES  OF  GRASS.    A  volume  of  Poems,  just  published. 

To  give  judgment  on  real  poems,  one  needs  an  account  of  the 
poet  himself.  Very  devilish  to  some,  and  very  divine  to  some, 
will  appear  the  poet  of  these  new  poems,  the  "LEAVES  OF 
GRASS  ;  "  an  attempt,  as  they  are,  of  a  na'fve,  masculine,  affec 
tionate,  contemplative,  sensual,  imperious  person,  to  cast  into 
literature  not  only  his  own  grit  and  arrogance,  but  his  own  • 
flesh  and  form,  undraped,  regardless  of  models,  regardless  of 
modesty  or  law,  and  ignorant  or  silently  scornful,  as  at  first  ap 
pears,  of  all  except  his  own  presence  and  experience,  and  all 
outside  the  fiercely  loved  land  of  his  birth,  and  the  birth  of  his 
parents,  and  their  parents  for  several  generations  before  him. 
Politeness  this  man  has  none,  and  regulation  he  has  none.  A 
rude  child  of  the  people  !  — No  imitation  —  No  foreigner  —  but 
a  growth  and  idiom  of  America.  No  discontented —  a  careless 
slouch,  enjoying  to-day.  No  dilettante  democrat  —  a  man  who 
is  art-and-part  with  the  commonalty,  and  with  immediate  life  — 
loves  the  streets  —  loves  the  docks  —  loves  the  free  rasping  talk 
of  men — likes  to  be  called  by  his  given  name,  and  nobody  at 
all  need  Mr.  him —  can  laugh  with  laughers  —  likes  the  ungen- 
teel  ways  of  laborers  —  is  not  prejudiced  one  mite  against  the 
Irish  —  talks  readily  with  them  —  talks  readily  with  niggers  — 
does  not  make  a  stand  on  being  a  gentleman,  nor  on  learning 


LEAVES   OF   GRASS   IMPRINTS.  31 

or  manners  —  eats  cheap  fare,  likes  the  strong  flavored  coffee  of 
the  coffee-stands  in  the  market,  at  sunrise  —  likes  a  supper  of 
oysters  fresh  from  the  oyster-smack  —  likes  to  make  one  at  the 
crowded  table  among  sailors  and  work-people  —  would  leave  a 
select  soiree  of  elegant  people  any  time  to  go  with  tumultuous 
men,  roughs,  receive  their  caresses  and  welcome,  listen  to  their 
noise,  oaths,  smut,  fluency,  laughter,  repartee  —  and  can  pre 
serve  his  presence  perfectly  among  these,  and  the  like  of  these. 
The  effects  he  produces  in  his  poems  are  no  effects  of  artists  or 
the  arts,  but  effects  of  the  original  eye  or  arm,  or  the  actual  at 
mosphere,  or  tree,  or  bird.  You  may  feel  the  unconscious  teach 
ing  of  a  fine  brute,  but  will  never  feel  the  artificial  teaching  of 
a  fine  writer  or  speaker. 

Other  poets  celebrate  great  events,  personages,  romances, 
wars,  loves,  passions,  the  victories  and  power  of  their  country, 
or  some  real  or  imagined  incident  —  and  polish  their  work,  and 
come  to  conclusions,  and  satisfy  the  reader.  This  poet  cele 
brates  natural  propensities  in  himself;  and  that  is  the  way  he 
celebrates  all.  He  comes  to  no  conclusions,  and  does  not  sat 
isfy  the  reader.  He  certainly  leaves  him  what  the  serpent  left 
the  woman  and  the  man,  the  taste  of  the  Paradisaic  tree  of  the 
knowledge  of  good  and  evil,  never  to  be  erased  again. 

What  good  is  it  to  argue  about  egotism  ?  There  can  be  no 
two  thoughts  on  Walt  Whitman's  egotism.  That  is  avowedly  ' 
what  he  steps  out  of  the  crowd  and  turns  and  faces  them  for. 
Mark,  critics  !  Otherwise  is  not  used  for  you  the  key  that  leads 
to  the  use  of  the  other  keys  to  this  well-enveloped  man.  His 
whole  work,  his  life,  manners,  friendships,  writings,  all  have 
among  their  leading  purposes  an  evident  purpose  to  stamp  a 
new  type  of  character,  namely  his  own,  and  indelibly  fix  it  and 
publish  it,  not  for  a  model  but  an  illustration,  for  the  present 
and  future  of  American  letters  and  American  young  men,  for 
the  south  the  same  as  the  north,  and  for  the  Pacific  and  Mis 
sissippi  country,  and  Wisconsin  and  Texas  and  Kansas  and 
Canada  and  Havana  and  Nicaragua,  just  as  much  as  New  York 
arid  Boston.  Whatever  is  needed  toward  this  achievement  he 
puts  his  hand  to,  and  lets  imputations  take  their  time  to  die. 

First  be  yourself  what  you  would  show  in  your  poem  —  such 
seems  to  be  this  man's  example  and  inferred  rebuke  to  the 
schools  of  poets.  Pie  makes  no  allusions  to  books  or  writers  ; 
their  spirits  do  not  seem  to  have  touched  him ;  he  has  not  a 
word  to  say  for  or  against  them,  or  their  theories  or  ways.  He 
never  offers  others  ;  what  he  continually  offers  is  the  man  whom 
our  Brooklynites  know  so  well.  Of  pure  American  breed,  large 
and  lusty — age  thirty-six  years,  (1855,)— never  once  using 
medicine  —  never  dressed  in  black,  always  dressed  freely  and 
clean  in  strong  clothes  —  neck  open,  shirt-collar  flat  and  broad, 
countenance  tawny  transparent  red,  beard  well-mottled  with 


32  LEAVES   OF  GRASS   IMPRINTS. 

white,  hair  like  hay  after  it  has  been  mowed  in  the  field  and  lies 
tossed  and  streaked  —  his  physiology  corroborating  a  rugged 
phrenology*  —  a  person  singularly  beloved  and  looked  toward, 
especially  by  young  men  and  the  illiterate  —  one  who  has  firm 
attachments  there,  and  associates  there  —  one  who  does  not 
associate  with  literary  people  —  a  man  never  called  upon  to 
make  speeches  at  public  dinners  —  never  on  platforms  amid  the 
crowds  of  clergymen,  or  professors,  or  aldermen,  or  congress 
men  —  rather  down  in  the  bay  with  pilots  in  their  pilot-boat  — 
or  off  on  a  cruise  with  fishers  in  a  fishing-smack  —  or  riding  on 
a  Broadway  omnibus,  side  by  side  with  the  driver  —  or  with  a 
band  of  loungers  over  the  open  grounds  of  the  country  —  fond 
of  New  York  and  Brooklyn—  fond  of  the  life  of  the  great  fer 
ries  —  one  whom,  if  you  should  meet,  you  need  not  expect  to 
meet  an  extraordinary  person  —  one  in  whom  you  will  see  the 
singularity  which  consists  in  no  singularity  —  whose  contact  is 
no  dazzle  or  fascination,  nor  requires  any  deference,  but  has 
the  easy  fascination  of  what  is  homely  and  accustomed  —  as  of 
something  you  knew  before,  and  was  waiting  for  —  there  you 
have  Walt  Whitman,  the  begetter  of  a  new  offspring  out  of  lit 
erature,  taking  with  easy  nonchalance  the  chances  of  its  pres 
ent  reception,  and,  through  all  misunderstandings  and  distrusts, 
the  chances  of  its  future  reception — preferring  always  to  speak 
« for  hiaiself  rather  than  have  others  speak  for  him. 


From  the  Christian  Spritualist.    (1856.) 
LEAVES  OF  GRASS. 

Carlyle  represents  a  contemporary  reviewer  taking  leave  of  the 
Belles-Lettres  department  somewhat  in  this  abrupt  manner : 
"  The  end  having  come,  it  is  fit  that  we  end — Poetry  having 

*  Phrenological  Notes  on  W.  Whitman,  by  L.  N.  FOWLER.  July,  1849.  —  Sire  of 
head  large,  23  inches.  Leading  traits  appear  to  ba  Friendship,  Sympathy,  Sub 
limity,  and  Self-Esteem,  and  markedly  among  his  combinations  the  daneerous 
faults  of  Indolence,  a  tendency  to  the  pleasures  of  Voluptuousness  and  Alimen- 
tiveness,  and  a  certain  reckless  swing  of  animal  will. 

Amativeness  large,  * 6;  Philoprogenitiveness,  6:  Adhesiveness,  6;  Inhabitive- 
ness,  6;  Concentratiyeness,  4;  Combativeness,  6;  Destructiveness,  5  to  6;  Alimen- 
tiveness,  6;  Acquisitiveness,  4;  Secretiveness,  3;  Cautiousness,  0;  Approbative- 
ness,  4:  Self-Esteem,  (}  to  7;  Firmness,  6  to  7;  Conscientiousness,  6:  Hope,  4; 
Marvellousness,  3;  Veneration,  4;  Benevolence,  6  to  7;  Constructiveness,  5; 
Ideality,  5  to  6;  Sublimity,  (5  to  7;  Imitation,  5;  Mirthfulness,  5;  Individuality,  6; 
Form.  6;  Size,  6;  Weight,  6;  Color,  3;  Order,  5;  Calculation,  5;  Locality,  6; 
Eventuality,  6;  Time,  3;  Tune,  4;  Language,  .5;  Causality,  5  to  6;  Comparison, 
6;  Suavitiveness,  4;  Intuitiveness,  or  Human  Nature,  6. 


*  The  organs  are  marked  by  figures  from  1  to  7,  indicating  their  degrees  of  de 
velopment,  1  meaning  very  small,  2  small,  3  moderate,  4  average,  5  full,  6  large, 
and  7  very  large. 


LEAVES   OP  GRASS   IMPRINTS.  33 

ceased  to  be  read,  or  published,  or  written,  how  can  it  continue 
to  be  reviewed  ?  With  your  Lake  Schools,  and  Border-Thief 
Schools,  and  Cockney  and  Satanic  Schools,  there  has  been 
enough  to  do ;  and  now,  all  these  Schools  having  burnt  or 
smouldered  themselves  out,  and  left  nothing  but  a  wide-spread 
wreck  of  ashes,  dust,  and  cinders  —  or  perhaps  dying  embers, 
kicked  to  and  fro  under  the  feet  of  innumerable  women  and 
children  in  the  magazines,  and  at  best  blown  here  and  there 
into  transient  sputters,  what  remains  but  to  adjust  ourselves  to 
circumstances  ?  Urge  me  not,"  continues  this  desperate  litte 
rateur,  "  with  considerations  that  Poetry,  as  the  inwarU  Voice 
of  Life,  must  be  perennial ;  only  dead  in  one  form  to  become 
alive  in  another  ;  that  this  still  abundant  deluge  of  Metre,  see 
ing  there  must  needs  be  fractions  of  Poetry  floating,  scattered 
in  it,  ought  still  to  be  net-fished ;  at  all  events,  surveyed  and 
taken  note  of.  The  survey  of  English  metre,  at  this  epoch,  per 
haps  transcends  the  human  faculties ;  to  hire  out  the  reading 
of  it  by  estimate,  at  a  remunerative  rate  per  page,  would,  in  a 
few  quarters,  reduce  the  cash-box  of  any  extant  review  to  the 
verge  of  insolvency."  • 

Such  is  the  humorous  but  essentially  truthful  picture  of  the 
condition  and  product  of  the  creative  faculties  during  the  second 
quarter  of  the  present  century.  The  great  jtoets,  Byron,  Shel 
ley,  Wordsworth,  Goethe,  and  Schiller,  had  fulfilled  their  tasks 
and  gone  to  other  spheres  ;  and  all  that  remained,  with  few  ex 
ceptions,  were  weak  and  feeble  echoes  of  their  dying  strains, 
caught  up  and  repeated  by  numerous  imitators  and  pretenders. 
And  so  has  it  ever  been ;  the  visions  and  perceptions  of  one 
man  become  the  creed  and  superficial  life-element  of  other 
minds.  Swedenborg  is  worthy  to  be  enrolled  among  the  master 
minds  of  the  world,  because  he  entered  for  himself  into  the 
Arcana  of  the  profoundest  mysteries  that  can  concern  human 
intelligences ;  his  great  thoughts  are  revolved,  quoted,  and  rep 
resented  in  all  "New  Church "  publications,  but  very  rarely 
digested  and  assimilated  by  those  who  claim  to  be  his  follow 
ers.  Still  more  rare  is  it  to  find  any  receiver  of  "  the  heavenly 
doctrines"  determined  to  enter  for  himself  into  the  very  inte 
riors  of  all  that  Swedenborg  taught  —  to  see,  not  the  mighty 
reflections  that  Swedenborg  was  able  to  give  of  interior  realities, 
but  their  originals  as  they  stand  constellated  in  the  heavens ! 

But  Divine  Providence,  leading  forth  the  race,  as  a  father  the 
tottering  steps  of  his  children,  causes  the  outward  form,  on 
which  all  men  are  prone  to  rely,  to  be  forever  changing  and 
passing  away  before  their  eyes.  The  seeds  of  death  are  ever 
found  lurking  in  the  fairest  external  appearances,  till  those  ex-: 
ternals  become  the  mere  correspondences  and  representatives 
of  interior  realities,  and  then,  though  enduring  as  the  fadeless 
garments  of  the  blest,  they  are  ever-varying,  as  those  robes  of 
3 


34  LEAVES   OP   GRrvSS   IMPRINTS. 

light  change  with  each  changing  state.  The  Coming  Age  will 
recognize  the  profoundest  truths  in  the  internal  thought  of  the 
Swedish  sage,  while  his  most  tenacious  adherents  will  be  forced 
to  admit  that,  in  externals,  he  often  erred,  and  was  not  unfre- 
quently  deceived.  But  the  discovered  error  will  not  only  wean 
them  from  a  blind  and  bigoted  reliance  upon  frail  man,  but  con 
firm  the  sincere  lovers  of  truth  in  loyalty  to  her  standard.  So, 
also,  the  Spiritualists  are  being  taught  a  severe  but  salutary  les 
son,  that  if  they  will  penetrate  into  the  heavenly  Arcana  of  the 
Inner  Life,  they  must  do  so  by  purifying  and  elevating  their 
own  mifids,  and  not  by  "  sitting  in  circles  "  or  ransacking  town 
and  country  to  find  the  most  "  reliable  Mediums."  Still  no 
step  in  human  progress  and  development  is  in  vain  ;  even  the 
falls  of  the  child  are  essential  to  its  discipline.  The  mistakes 
and  errors  of  men  are  needful  while  in  their  present  imperfect 
state.  They  are  to  the  seekers  of  truth  what  trials  and  losses 
are  to  those  in  the  pursuit  of  wealth ;  they  but  enhance  the 
value  of  the  prize,  and  confirm  the  devotion  of  the  true  aspirant, 
as  frowns  rekindle  the  ardor  of  lovers. 

Moreover,  as  man  must  ever  enter  into  the  kingdom  of  a  new 
unfolding  truth  with  the  simplicity  and  teachableness  of  little 
children,  it  is  well  that  the  outer  form  of  the  old  disappear,  that 
the  new  may  stand  alone  in  its  place.  It  seems  also  to  be  a  Law 
that  when  a  change  entire  and  universal  is  to  be  outwrought,  the 
means  preparatory  to  its  introduction  shall  be  equally  wide 
spread,  and  ultimated  to  the  lowest  possible  plane.  Hence  the 
Spiritual  manifestations  meet  the  most  external  minds ;  and 
allow  even  the  unregenerate  to  know  by  experience  the  fact  and 
process  of  Spiritual  inspiration;  so  that  scepticism  becomes 
impossible  to  the  candid  and  living  mind.  The  second  step  will 
be,  after  such  have  been  convinced  that  Spiritual  intercourse  is 
possible,  that  they  learn  that  it  is  worse  than  useless  for  the  pur 
pose  of  attaining  anything  desirable,  beyond  this  conviction  — 
except  so  far  as  is  orderly  and  directed,  not  by  the  will  of  man, 
but  of  God.  But  as  the  old  form  of  poetic  inspiration  died  out 
with  Byron  and  Shelley,  Wordsworth  and  Goethe,  and  as  the 
miscellaneous  Spirit-intercourse  itself  also  as  quickly  passes 
away,  there  will,  we  apprehend,  spring  up  forms  of  mediatorial 
inspiration,  of  which  there  will  be  two  permanent  types.  The 
first  and  highest,  as  it  seems  to  us,  will  be  the  opening  of  the 
interiors  to  direct  influx  to  the  inspiring  sources  of  love  and 
wisdom.  The  heavens  will  flow  down  into  the  hearts  and  lives, 
into  the  thought  and  speech  of  harmonic  natures,  as  the  silent 
dews  impregnate  the  patient  earth.  Men  will  live  in  heaven, 
hence  they  must  be  inspired  by  that  breath  of  life  that  fills  its 
ethereal  expanse.  A  second  class  of  Media  will  be  used  for  the 
ultimation,  for  ends  of  use  and  in  accordance  with  Laws  of  Or 
der,  of  the  creative  thoughts  and  hymns,  the  Epics  and  Lyrics, 


LEAVES   OP   GRASS   IMPRINTS.  35 

of  individual  Spirits  and  societies  of  Spirits.  These  will  be  to 
the  former  Media  as  the  youthful  artist  who  copies  the  work  of 
a  master,  to  the  Angelos  and  Raphaels,  who  both  design  and 
execute  their  plans,  though  they  themselves,  in  their  deepest 
interiors,  are  instructed  and  sustained  from  above. 

But  in  the  transition  period  in  which  we  now  are,  many  varie 
ties  of  Mediumship  must  be  expected.  There  are  those  who 
stand  in  rapport  with  the  diseased  mentalities  of  the  past  and 
present,  and  pour  forth  as  Divine  Revelations  the  froth  and 
scum  of  a  receding  age ;  they  are  the  sponges  who  absorb  the 
waste  and  impurities  of  humanity.  They  are  also  like  running 
sores  that  gather  the  corrupt  humors  and  drain  the  body  of  its 
most  noxious  fluids.  There  are  others  who  come  in  contact  with 
the  outmost  portion  of  the  Spirit-life.  These  give  crude,  and  in 
themselves,  false  notions  of  the  state  of  man  after  death ;  yet 
they  prepare  the  way  for  more  truthful  disclosures  ;  if  in  no 
other  way  by  stimulating  the  appetite  for  more  substantial 
nourishment.  There  are  those  also  who  are  lifted  by  genial 
inspirations  to  receive  influxes  from  the  upper  mind-sphere  of 
the  age.  They  stand,  as  it  were,  on  clear  mountains  of  intel 
lectual  elevation,  and  with  keenest  perception  discern  the  purer 
forms  of  new  unfolding  truths  ere  they  become  sufficiently  em 
bodied  to  be  manifest  to  the  grosser  minds  of  the  race.  Of  these 
Ralph  Waldo  Emerson  is  the  highest  type.  He  sees  the  future 
of  truths  as  our  Spirit-seers  discern  the  future  of  man ;  he 
welcomes  those  impalpable  forms,  as  Spiritualists  receive  with 
gladdened  minds  the  returning  hosts  of  Spirit-friends. 

There  are  other  mediatorial  natures  who  are  in  mental  and 
heart-sympathy  with  man,  as  he  now  is,  struggling  to  free  him 
self  from  the  tyranny  of  the  old  and  effete,  and  to  grasp  and 
retain  the  new  life  flowing  down  from  the  heavens.  And  as  the 
kindling  rays  at  first  produce  more  smoke  than  fire,  so  their  lay 
is  one  of  promise  rather  than  performance.  Such  we  conceive 
to  be  the  interior  condition  of  the  author  of  "  LEAVES  OF 
GRASS."  He  accepts  man  as  he  is  as  to  his  whole  nature,  and 
all  men  as  his  own  brothers.  The  lambent  flame  of  his  genius 
.encircles  the  world  —  nor  does  he  clearly  discern  between  that 
which  is  to  be  preserved,  and  that  which  is  but  as  fuel  for  the 
purification  of  the  ore  from  its  dross.  There  is  a  wild  strength, 
a  Spartan  simplicity  about  the  man,  and  he  stalks  among  the 
dapper  gentlemen  of  this  generation,  like  a  drunken  Hercules 
amid  the  dainty  dancers.  That  his  song  is  highly  mediatorial, 
he  himself  asserts,  though  probably  he  is  unacquainted  with  the 
Spiritual  developments  of  the  age. 

"  Through  me,"  he  sings,  "many  long  dumb  voices, 
Voices  of  the  interminable  generations  of  slaves, 
Voices  of  the  diseased  and  despairing, 
Voices  of  the  cycles  of  preparation  and  accretion, 
And  of  threads  that  connect  the  stars, 
And  of  the  rights  of  them  the  others  are  down  upon. 


36  LEAVES   OP   GRASS   IMPRINTS. 

Through  me  forbidden  voices  —  voices  veiled, 
Voices  indecent,  by  me  clarified  and  transfigured." 

We  omit  much  even  in  this  short  extract,  for  the  book 
abounds  in  passages  that  cannot  be  quoted  in  drawing-rooms, 
and  expressions  that  fall  upon  the  tympanums  of  ears  polite, 
with  a  terrible  dissonance.  His  very  gait,  as  he  walks  through 
the  world,  makes  dainty  people  nervous ;  and  conservatives 
regard  him  as  a  social  revolution.  His  style  is  everywhere 
graphic  and  strong,  and  he  sings  many  things  before  untouched 
in  prose  or  rhyme,  in  an  idiom  that  is  neither  prose  nor  rhyme, 
nor  yet  orthodox  blank  verse.  But  it  serves  his  purpose  well. 
He  wears  his  strange  garb,  cut  and  made  by  himself,  as  grace 
fully  as  a  South  American  cavalier  his  poncho.  We  will  con 
tinue  our  quotations. 

(Extract  of  several  pages.) 

Such  are  the  graphic  pictures  which  this  new  world-painter 
flings  from  his  easel  and  dashes  upon  the  moving  panorama  of 
life.  His  night-thoughts  are  not  less  striking,  as,  borne  by  the 
Muse,  he  looks  into  every  chamber,  and  hears  the  quiet  breath 
ing  of  slumbering  humanity. 

As  the  volume  advances  toward  its  conclusion,  the  Spirit 
of  the  poet  becomes  calmer  and  more  serenely  elevated.  But 
everywhere  his  sympathy  is  with  man,  and  not  with  conven 
tionalisms. 

We  cannot  take  leave  of  this  remarkable  volume  without 
advising  our  friends  who  are  not  too  delicately  nerved,  to  study 
the  work  as  a  sign  of  the  times,  written,  as  we  perceive,  under 
powerful  influxes ;  a  prophecy  and  promise  of  much  that 
awaits  all  who  are  entering  with  us  into  the  opening  doors  of  a 
new  era.  A  portion  of  that  thought  which  broods  over  the 
American  nation,  is  here  seized  and  bodied  forth  by  a  son  of  the 
people,  rudely,  wildly,  and  with  some  perversions,  yet  strongly 
and  genuinely,  according  to  the  perception  of  this  bold  writer. 
He  is  the  young  Hercules  who  has  seized  the  serpents  that 
would  make  him  and  us  their  prey ;  but  instead  of  strangling, 
he  would  change  them  to  winged  and  beautiful  forms,  who  shall 
become  the  servants  of  mankind. 


From  Putnam's  Monthly,  September,  1855. 

WALT  WHITMAN'S  LEAVES  OF  GRASS.  —  Our  account  of  the 
last  month's  literature  would  be  incomplete  without  some  notice 
of  a  curious  and  lawless  collection  of  poems,  called  "  LEAVES 
OF  GRASS,"  and  issued  in  a  thin  quarto,  without  the  name  of 
publisher  or  author.  The  poems,  twelve  in  number,  are  nei 
ther  in  rhyme  nor  blank  verse,  but  in  a  sort  of  excited  prose, 


LEAVES   OF  GRASS  IMPRINTS.  37 

broken  into  lines  without  any  attempt  at  measure  or  regularity, 
and,  as  many  readers  will  perhaps  think,  without  any  idea  of 
sense  or  reason.  The  writer's  scorn  for  the  wonted  usages  of 
good  writing,  extends  to  the  vocabulary  he  adopts ;  words 
usually  banished  from  polite  society  are  here  employed  without 
reserve,  and  with  perfect  indifference  as  to  their  effect  on  the 
reader's  mind ;  and  not  only  is  the  book  one  not  to  be  read 
aloud  to  a  mixed  audience,  but  the  introduction  of  terms 
never  before  heard  or  seen,  and  of  slang  expressions,  often 
renders  an  otherwise  striking  passage  altogether  laughable. 
But,  as  the  writer  is  a  new  light  in  poetry,  it  is  only  fair  to  let 
him  state  his  theory  for  himself.  We  extract  from  the  preface  : 

(Extract.) 

The  application  of  these  principles,  and  of  many  others 
equally  peculiar,  which  are  expounded  in  a  style  equally  oracu 
lar  throughout  the  long  preface  —  is  made  passim,  and  often 
with  comical  success  in  the  poems  themselves,  which  may 
briefly  be  described  as  a  compound  of  the  New  England  tran- 
scendentalist  and  New  York  rowdy.  A  fireman  or  omnibus 
driver,  who  had  intelligence  enough  to  absorb  the  speculations 
of  that  school  of  thought  which  culminated  at  Boston  some  fif 
teen  or  eighteen  years  ago,  and  resources  of  expression  to  put 
them  forth  again  in  a  form  of  his  own,  with  sufficient  self-con 
ceit  and  contempt  for  public  taste  to  affront  all  usual  propriety 
of  diction,  might  have  written  this  gross  yet  elevated,  this 
superficial  yet  profound,  this  preposterous  yet  somehow  fasci 
nating  book.  As  we  say,  it  is  a  mixture  of  Yankee  transcenden 
talism,  and  New  York  rowdyism,  and,  what  must  be  surprising 
to  both  these  elements,  they  here  seem  to  fuse  and  combine 
with  the  most  perfect  harmony.  The  vast  and  vague  concep 
tions  of  the  one,  lose  nothing  of  their  quality  in  passing 
through  the  coarse  and  odd  intellectual  medium  of  the  other ; 
while  there  is  an  original  perception  of  nature,  a  manly  brawn, 
and  an  epic  directness  in  our  new  poet,  which  belong  to  no  other 
adept  of  the  transcendental  school.  But  we  have  no  intention 
of  regularly  criticising  this  very  irregular  production ;  our  aim 
is  rather  to  cull,  from  the  rough  and  ragged  thicket  of  its  pages, 
a  few  passages  equally  remarkable  in  point  of  thought  and 
expression.  Of  course  we  do  not  select  those  which  are  the 
most  transcendental  or  the  most  bold. 

(Extracts.) 

As  seems  very  proper  in  a  book  of  transcendental  poetry,  the 
author  withholds  his  name  from  the  title-page,  and  presents  his 
portrait,  neatly  engraved  on  steel,  instead.  This,  no  doubt,  is 
upon  the  principle  that  the  name  is  merely  accidental ;  while 
the  portrait  affords  an  idea  of  the  essential  being  from  whom 
these  utterances  proceed.  We  must  add,  however,  that  this 


38  LEAVES   OF  GRASS   IMPRINTS. 

significant  reticence  does  not  prevail  throughout  the  volume,  for 
we  learn  on  p.  29,  that  our  poet  is  "Walt  Whitman,  an  Ameri 
can,  one  of  the  roughs,  a  kosmos."  That  he  was  an  American, 
we  knew  before,  for,  aside  from  America,  there  is  no  quarter  of 
the  universe  where  such  a  production  could  have  had  a  genesis. 
That  he  was  one  of  the  roughs  was  also  tolerably  plain ;  but  that 
he  was  a  kosmos,  is  a  piece  of  news  we  were  hardly  prepared 
for.  Precisely  what  a  kosmos  is,  we  hope  Walt  Whitman  will 
take  early  occasion  to  inform  the  impatient  public. 


From  the  American  Phrenological  Journal,  (1856.) 

AN  ENGLISH  AND  AN  AMERICAN  POET. 

LEAVES  OF  GRASS.    Poems  by  Walt  Whitman.    Brooklyn,  1855. 

MAUD,  and  other  Poems.    By  Alfred  Tennyson.    London,  1855. 

It  is  always  reserved  for  second-rate  poems  immediately  to 
gratify.  As  first-rate  or  natural  objects,  in  their  perfect  sim 
plicity  and  proportion,  do  not  startle  or  strike,  but  appear  no 
more  than  matters  of  course,  so  probably  natural  poetry  does 
not,  for  all  its  being  the  rarest,  and  telling  of  the  longest  and 
largest  work.  The  artist  or  writer  whose  talent  is  to  please  the 
connoisseurs  of  his  time,  may  obey  the  laws  of  his  time,  and 
achieve  the  intense  and  elaborated  beauty  of  parts.  The  per 
fect  poet  cannot  afford  any  special  beauty  of  parts,  or  to  limit 
himself  by  any  laws  less  than  those  universal  ones  of  the  great 
masters,  which  include  all  times,  and  all  men  and  women,  and 
the  living  and  the  dead.  For  from  the  study  of  the  universe  is 
drawn  this  irrefragable  truth,  that  the  law  of  the  requisites  of  a 
grand  poem,  or  any  other  complete  workmanship,  is  originality, 
and  the  average  and  superb  beauty  of  the  ensemble.  Possessed 
with  this  law,  the  fitness  of  aim,  time,  persons,  places,  surely 
follows.  Possessed  with  this  law,  and  doing  justice  to  it,  no 
poet  or  any  one  else  will  make  anything  ungraceful  or  mean,  any 
more  than  any  emanation  of  nature  is. 

The  poetry  of  England,  by  the  many  rich  geniuses  of  that 
wonderful  little  island,  has  grown  out  of  the  facts  of  the  English 
race,  the  monarchy  and  aristocracy  prominent  over  the  rest,  and 
conforms  to  the  spirit  of  them.  No  nation  ever  did  or  ever  will 
receive  with  national  affection  any  poets  except  those  born  of  its 
national  blood.  Of  these,  the  writings  express  the  finest  infu 
sions  of  government,  traditions,  faith,  and  .the  dependence  or 
independence  of  a  people,  and  even  the  good  or  bad  physiog 
nomy,  and  the  ample  or  small  geography.  Thus  what  very 
properly  fits  a  subject  of  the  British  crown  may  fit  very  ill  an 
American  freeman.  No  fine  romance,  no  inimitable  delineation 
of  character,  no  grace  of  delicate  illustrations,  no  rare  picture 


•  LEAVES   OF  GRASS  IMPRINTS.  39 

of  shore  or  mountain  or  sky,  no  deep  tlwmght  of  the  intellect,  is 
so  important  to  a  man  as  his  opinion  of  himself  is ;  everything 
receives  its  tinge  from  that.  In  the  verse  of  all  those  undoubt 
edly  great  writers,  Shakspeare  just  as  much  as  the  rest,  there  is 
the  air  which  to  America  is  the  air  of  death.  The  mass  of  the 
people,  the  laborers  and  all  who  serve,  are  slag,  refuse.  The 
countenances  of  kings  and  great  lords  are  beautiful ;  the  coun 
tenances  of  mechanics  are  ridiculous  and  deformed.  What  play 
of  Shakspeare,  represented  in  America,  is  not  an  insult  to 
America,  to  the  marrow  in  its  bones  ?  How  can  the  tone  never 
silent  in  their  plots  and  characters  be  applauded,  unless  Wash 
ington  should  have  been  caught  and  hung,  and  Jefferson  was 
the  most  enormous  of  liars,  and  common  persons,  north  and 
south,  should  bow  low  to  their  betters,  and  to  organic  superiority 
of  blood  ?  Sure  as  the  heavens  envelop  the  earth,  if  the 
Americans  want  a  race  of  bards  worthy  of  1855,  and  of  the 
stern  reality  of  this  republic,  they  must  cast  around  for  men 
essentially  different  from  the  old  poets,  and  from  the  modern 
successions  of  jinglers  and  snivellers  and  fops. 

English  versification  is  full  of  these  danglers,  and  America 
follows  after  them.  Every  body  writes  poetry,  and  yet  there  is 
not  a  single  poet.  An  age  greater  than  the  proudest  of  the  past 
is  swiftly  slipping  away,  without  one  lyric  voice  to  seize  its 
greatness,  and  speak  it  as  an  encouragement  and  onward  lesson. 
We  have  heard,  by  many  grand  announcements,  that  he  was  to 
come,  but  will  he  come  ? 

A  mighty  Poet  whom  this  age  shall  choose 

To  be  its  spokesman  to  all  coming  times. 

In  the  ripe  full-blown  season  of  his  soul, 

He  shall  go  forward,  in  his  spirit's  strength, 

And  grapple  with  the  questions  of  all  time, 

And  wring  from  them  their  meanings.    As  King  Saul 

Called  up  the  buried  prophet  from  his  grave 

To  speak  his  doom,  so  shall  this  Poet-king 

Call  up  the  dread  past  from  its  awful  grave 

To  tell  him  of  our  future.    As  the  air 

Doth  sphere  the  world,  so  shall  his  heart  of  love  — 

Loving  mankind,  not  peoples.    As  the  lake 

Reflects  the  flower,  tree,  rock,  and  bending  heaven, 

Shall  he  reflect  our  great  humanity  ; 

And  as  the  young  Spring  breathes  with  living  breath 

On  a  dead  branch,  till  it  sprouts  fragrantly 

Green  leaves  and  sunny  flowers,  shall  he  breathe  life 

Through  every  theme  he  touch,  making  all  Beauty 

And  Poetry  forever  like  the  stars.  (Alexander  Smith.) 

The  best  of  the  school  of  poets  at  present  received  in  Great 
Britain  and  America  is  Alfred  Tennyson.  He  is  the  bard  of 
ennui  and  of  the  aristocracy,  and  their  combination  into  love. 
This  love  is  the  old  stock  love  of  playwrights  and  romancers, 
Shakspeare  the  same  as  the  rest.  It  is  possessed  of  the  same 
unnatural  and  shocking  passion  for  some  girl  or  woman,  that 
wrenches  it  from  its  manhood,  emasculated  and  impotent, 


40  LEAVES   OF  GRASS  IMPRINTS. 

without  strength  to  hold  the  rest  of  the  objects  and  goods  of 
life  in  their  proper  positions.  It  seeks  nature  for  sickly  uses. 
It  goes  screaming  and  weeping  after  the  facts  of  the  universe, 
in  their  calm  beauty  and  equanimity,  to  note  the  occurrence  of 
itself,  and  to  sound  the  news,  in  connection  with  the  charms 
of  the  neck,  hair,  or  complexion  of  a  particular  female. 

Poetry,  to  Tennyson  and  his  British  and  American  eleves,  is 
a  gentleman  of  the  first  degree,  boating,  fishing,  and  shooting 
genteelly  through  nature,  admiring  the  ladies,  and  talking  to 
them,  in  company,  with  that  elaborate  half-choked  deference 
that  is  to  be  made  up  by  the  terrible  license  of  men  among 
themselves.  The  spirit  of  the  burnished  society  of  upper-class 
England  fills  this  writer  and  his  effusions  from  top  to  toe.  Like 
that,  he  does  not  ignore  courage  and  the  superior  qualities  of 
men,  but  all  is  to  show  forth  through  dandified  forms.  He 
meets  the  nobility  and  gentry  half-way.  The  models  are  the 
same  both  to  the  poet  and  the  parlors.  Both  have  the  same 
supercilious  elegance,  both  love  the  reminiscences  which  extol 
caste,  both  agree  on  the  topics  proper  for  mention  and  discus 
sion,  both  hold  the  same  undertone  of  church  and  state,  both 
have  the  same  languishing  melancholy  and  irony,  both  indulge 
largely  in  persiflage,  both  are  marked  by  the  contour  of  high 
blood  and  a  constitutional  aversion  to  anything  cowardly  and 
mean,  both  accept  the  love  depicted  in  romances  as  the  great 
business  of  a  life  or  a  poem,  both  seem  unconscious  of  the 
mighty  truths  of  eternity  and  immortality,  both  are  silent  on 
the  presumptions  of  liberty  and  equality,  and  both  devour  them 
selves  in  solitary  lassitude.  Whatever  may  be  said  of  all  this, 
it  harmonizes  and  represents  facts.  The  present  phases  of 
high-life  in  Great  Britain  are  as  natural  a  growth  there,  as  Ten 
nyson  and  his  poems  are  a  natural  growth  of  those  phases.  It 
remains  to  be  distinctly  admitted  that  this  man  is  a  real  first- 
class  poet,  infused  amid  all  that  ennui  and  aristocracy. 

Meanwhile  a  strange  voice  parts  others  aside  and  demands 
for  its  owner  that  position  that  is  only  allowed  after  the  seal  of 
many  returning  years  has  stamped  with  approving  stamp  the 
claims  of  the  loftiest  leading  genius.  Do  you  think  the  best 
honors  of  the  earth  are  won  so  easily,  Walt  Whitman  ?  Do 
you  think  city  and  country  are  to  fall  before  the  vehement  ego 
tism  of  your  recitative  of  yourself  ? 

I  am  the  poet  of  the  body, 

And  I  am  the  poet  of  the  soul. 

The  pleasures  of  heaven  are  with  me,  and  the  pains  of  hell  are  with  me, 

The  first  I  graft  and  increase  upon  myself,  the  latter  I  translate  into  a  new  tongue. 

I  am  the  poet  of  the  woman  the  same  as  the  man, 

And  I  say  it  is  as  great  to  be  a  woman  as  to  be  a  man. 

And  I  say  there  is  nothing  greater  than  the  mother  of  men. 

I  chant  a  new  chant  of  dilation  or  pride, 

We  have  had  ducking  and  deprecating  about  enough, 

I  show  that  size  is  only  development. 


LEAVES  OF  GRASS   IMPRINTS.    .  41 

It  is  indeed  a  strange  voice  !  Critics  and  lovers  and  readers 
of  poetry  as  hitherto  written,  may  well  be  excused  the  chilly 
and  unpleasant  shudders  which  will  assuredly  run  through 
them,  to  their  very  blood  and  bones,  when  they  first  read  Walt 
Whitman's  poems.  If  this  is  poetry,  where  must  its  foregoers 
stand  ?  And  what  is  at  once  to  become  of  the  ranks  of  rhyme 
sters,  melancholy  and  swallow-tailed,  and  of  all  the  confection 
ers  and  upholsterers  of  verse,  if  the  tan-faced  man  here  advan 
cing  and  claiming  to  speak  for  America  and  the  nineteenth 
hundred  of  the  Christian  list  of  years,  typifies  indeed  the  natural 
and  proper  bard  ? 

The  theory  and  practice  of  poets  have  hitherto  been  to  select 
certain  ideas  or  events  or  personages,  and  then  describe  them  in 
the  best  manner  they  could,  always  with  as  much  ornament  as  the 
case  allowed.  Such  are  not  the  theory  and  practice  of  the  new 
poet.  He  never  presents  for  perusal  a  poem  ready-made  on  the 
old  models,  and  ending  when  you  come  to  the  end  of  it;  but 
every  sentence  and  every  passage  tells  of  an  interior  not  always 
seen,  and  exudes  an  impalpable  something  which  sticks  to 
him  that  reads,  and  pervades  and  provokes  him  to  tread  the 
half-invisible  road  where  the  poet,  like  an  apparition,  is  strid 
ing  fearlessly  before.  If  Walt  Whitman's  premises  are  true, 
then  there  is  a  subtler  range  of  poetry  than  that  of  the  gran 
deur  of  acts  and  events,  as  in  Homer,  or  of  characters,  as  in 
Shakspeare  —  poetry  to  which  all  other  writing  is  subservient, 
and  which  confronts  the  very  meanings  of  the  works  of  nature 
and  competes  with  them.  It  is  the  direct  bringing  of  occur 
rences  and  persons  and  things  to  bear  on  the  listener  or  beholder, 
to  re-appear  through  him  or  her ;  and  it  offers  the  best  way  of 
making  them  a  part  of  him  and  her  as  the  right  aim  of  the 
greatest  poet. 

Of  the  spirit  of  life  invisible  forms  —  of  the  spirit  of  the 
seed  growing  out  of  the  ground  —  of  the  spirit  of  the  resistless 
motion  of  the  globe  passing  unsuspected  but  quick  as  lightning 
along  its  orbit  —  of  them  is  the  spirit  of  this  man's  poetry. 
Like  them  it  eludes  and  mocks  criticism,  and  appears  uner 
ringly  in  results.  Things,  facts,  events,  persons,  days,  ages, 
qualities,  tumble  pell-mell,  exhaustless  and  copious,  with  what 
appear  to  be  the  same  disregard  of  parts,  and  the  same  absence 
of  special  purpose,  as  in  nature.  But  the  voice  of  the  few  rare 
and  controlling  critics,  and  the  voice  of  more  than  one  genera 
tion  of  men,  or  two  generations  of  men,  must  speak  for  the  in 
expressible  purposes  of  nature,  and  for  this  haughtiest  of  writ 
ers  that  has  ever  yet  written  and  printed  a  book.  His  is  to 
prove  either  the  most  lamentable  of  failures  or  the  most  glori 
ous  of  triumphs,  in  the  known  history  of  literature.  And  after 
all  we  have  written  we  confess  our  brain-felt  and  heart-felt  in 
ability  to  decide  which  we  think  it  is  likely  to  be. 


42  LEAVES   OF   GRASS   IMPRINTS. 

From  the  Critic.    (London,  England.) 
LEAVES  OF  GRASS.    New  York,  1855.    London  :  Horsell. 

We  had  ceased,  we  imagined,  to  be  surprised  at  anything 
that  America  could  produce.  We  had  become  stoically  indif 
ferent  to  her  Woolly  Horses,  her  Mermaids,  her  Sea  Serpents, 
her  Barnums,  and  so  forth; — but  the  last  monstrous  impor 
tation  from  Brooklyn,  New  York,  has  scattered  our  indiffer 
ence  to  the  winds.  Here  is  a  thin  quarto  volume  without  an 
author's  name  on  the  title-page  ;  but  to  atone  for  which  we 
have  a  portrait  engraved  on  steel  of  the  notorious  individual 
who  is  the  poet  presumptive.  This  portrait  expresses  all  the 
features  of  the  hard  democrat,  and  none  of  the  flexile  delicacy 
of  the  civilized  poet.  The  damaged  hat,  the  rough  beard,  the 
naked  throat,  the  shirt  exposed  to  the  waist,  are  each  and  all 
presented  to  show  that  the  man  to  whom  these  articles  belong 
scorns  the  delicate  arts  of  civilization.  The  man  is  the  true 
impersonation  of  his  book  —  rough,  uncouth,  vulgar.  It  was 
by  the  merest  accident  that  we  discovered  the  name  of  this 
erratic  arid  newest  wonder;  but  at  page  29  we  find  that  he 
is  — 

Walt  Whitman,  nn  American,  one  of  the  roughs,  a  kosmos. 
Disorderly,  fleshly,  and  sensual. 

The  words  "an  American"  are  a  surplusage,  "one  of  the 
roughs  "  too  painfully  apparent ;  but  what  is  intended  to  be 
conveyed  by  "  a  kosmos  "  we  cannot  tell,  unless  it  means  a  man 
who  thinks  that  the  fine  essence  of  poetry  consists  in  writing 
a  book  which  an  American  reviewer  is  compelled  to  declare  is 
"not  to  be  read  aloud  to  a  mixed  audience."  We  should  have 
passed  over  this  book,  "  LEAVES  OF  GRASS,"  with  indignant 
contempt,  had  not  some  few  Transatlantic  critics  attempted  to 
"fix  "  this  Walt  Whitman  as  the  poet  who  shall  give  a  now 
and  independent  literature  to  America  —who  shall  form  a  race 
of  poets  as  Banquo's  issue  formed  a  line  of  kings.  Is  it  possi 
ble  that  the  most  prudish  nation  in  the  world  will  adopt  a  poet 
whose  indecencies  stink  in  the  nostrils  ?  We  hope  not ;  and 
yet  there  is  a  probability,  and  we  will  show  why,  that  this  Walt 
Whitman  will  not  meet  with  the  stern  rebuke  which  he  so 
richly  deserves.  America  has  felt,  oftener  perhaps  than  we 
have  declared,  that  she  has  no  national  poet — that  each  one 
of  her  children  of  song  has  relied  too  much  on  European  in 
spiration,  and  clung  too  fervently  to  the  old  conventionalities. 
It  is  therefore  not  unlikely  that  she  may  believe  in  the  dawn  of 
a  thoroughly  original  literature,  now  there  has  arisen  a  man 
who  scorns  the  Hellenic  deities,  who  has  no  belief  in,  perhaps 
because  he  has  no  knowledge  of,  Homer  and  Shakspeare  ;  who 
relies  on  his  own  rugged  nature,  and  trusts  to  his  own  rugged 
language,  being  himself  what  he  shows  in  his  poems.  Once 


LEAVES   OF  GRASS   IMPRINTS.  43 

transfix  him  as  the  genesis  of  a  new  era,  and  the  manner  of 
the  man  may  be  forgiven  or  forgotten.  But  what  claim  has 
this  Walt  Whitman  to  be  thus  considered,  or  to  be  considered  a 
poet  at  all  ?  We  grant  freely  enough  that  he  has  a  strong  rel 
ish  for  nature  and  freedom,  just  as  an  animal  has  ;  nay,  further, 
that  his  crude  mind  is  capable  of  appreciating  some  of  nature's 
beauties  ;  but  it  by  no  means  follows  that,  because  nature  is  ex 
cellent,  therefore  "art  is  contemptible.  Walt  Whitman  is  as  un 
acquainted  with  art,  as  a  hog  is  with  mathematics.  His  poems 
—  we  must  call  them  so  for  convenience — twelve  in  number, 
are  innocent  of  rhythm,  and  resemble  nothing  so  much  as  the 
war-cry  of  the  Red  Indians.  Indeed,  Walt  Whitman  has  had 
near  and  ample  opportunities  of  studying  the  vociferations  of  a 
few  amiable  savages.  Or  rather,  perhaps,  this  Walt  Whitman 
reminds  us  of  Caliban  flinging  down  his  logs,  and  setting  him 
self  to  write  a  poem.  In  fact,  Caliban,  and  not  Walt  Whitman, 
might  have  written  this  : 

I  too  am  not  a  bit  tamed  —  I  too  am  untranslatable, 
I  sound  my  barbaric  yawp  over  the  roof's  of  the  world. 

Is  this  man  with  the  "barbaric  yawp"  to  push  Longfellow 
into  the  shade,  and  he  meanwhile  to  stand  and  "make  mouths" 
at  the  sun  ?  The  chance  of  this  might  be  formidable  were  it 
not  ridiculous.  That  object  or  that  act  Avhich  most  develops 
the  ridiculous  element  carries  in  its  bosom  the  seeds  of  decay, 
and  is  wholly  powerless  to  trample  out  of  God's  universe  one 
spark  of  the  beautiful.  We  do  not,  then,  fear  this  Walt  Whit 
man,  who  gives  us  slang  in  the  place  of  melody,  and  rowdyism 
in  the  place  of  regularity.  The  depth  of  his  indecencies  will 
be  the  grave  of  his  fame,  or  ought  to  be  if  all  proper  feeling  is 
not  extinct.  The  very  nature  of  this  man's  compositions  ex 
cludes  us  from  proving  by  extracts  the  truth  of  our  remarks ; 
but  we,  who  are  not  prudish,  emphatically  declare  that  the  man 
who  wrote  page  79  of  the  "  LEAVES  OF  GRASS  "  deserves  noth 
ing  so  richly  as  the  public  executioner's  whip.  Walt  Whitman 
libels  the  highest  type  of  humanity,  and  calls  his  free  speech 
the  true  utterance  of  a  man  :  we,  who  may  have  been  misdi 
rected  by  civilization,  call  it  the  expression  of  a  beast. 

The  leading  idea  of  Walt  Whitman's  poems  is  as  old  as  the 
hills.  It  is  the  doctrine  of  universal  sympathy  which  the  first 
poet  maintained,  and  which  the  last  on  earth  will  maintain  also. 
He  says  : 

"Not  a  mutineer  walks  handcuffed  to  the  jail,  but  I  am  handcuffed  to  him  and 

walk  by  his  side. 
Not  a  cholera  patient  lies  at  the  last  gasp,  but  I  also  lie  at  the  last  gasp." 

To  show  this  sympathy  he  instances  a  thousand  paltry,  friv 
olous,  and  obscene  circumstances.  Herein  we  may  behold  the 
difference  between  a  great  and  a  contemptible  poet.  What 


44  LEAVES   OF   GRASS   IMPRINTS. 

Shakspeare — mighty  shade  of  the  mightiest  bard,  forgive  us 
the  comparison !  —  expressed  in  a  single  line, 

"  One  touch  of  nature  makes  the  whole  world  kin," 

this  "Walt  Whitman  has  tortured  into  scores  of  pages.  A  sin 
gle  extract  will  show  what  we  mean.  This  miserable  spinner 
of  words  declares  that  the  earth  has  "no  themes,  or  hints,  or 

Erovokers,"  and  never  had,  if  you  cannot  find  such  themes,  or 
hits,  or  provokers  in  — 

(Extract.} 

Can  it  be  possible  that  its  author  intended  this  as  a  portion 
of  a  poem  ?  Is  it  not  more  reasonable  to  suppose  that  Walt 
Whitman  has  been  learning  to  write,  and  that  the  compositor 
has  got  hold  of  his  copy-book  ?  The  American  critics  are,  in 
the  main,  pleased  with  this  man  because  he  is  self-reliant,  and 
because  he  assumes  all  the  attributes  of  his  country.  If  Walt 
Whitman  has  really  assumed  those  attributes,  America  should 
hasten  to  repudiate  them,  be  they  what  they  may.  The  critics 
are  pleased  also  because  he  talks  like  a  man  unaware  that  there 
was  ever  such  a  production  as  a  book,  or  ever  such  a  being  as  a 
writer.  This  in  the  present  day  is  a  qualification  exceedingly 
rare,  and  may  be  valuable,  so  we  wish  those  gentlemen  joy  of 
their  GREAT  UNTAMED. 

We  must  not  neglect  to  quote  an  unusual  passage,  which 
may  be  suggestive  to  writers  of  the  Old  World.  To  silence  our 
incredulous  readers,  we  assure  them  that  the  passage  may  be 
found  at  page  92. 

(Extract.} 

The  tansformation  and  the  ethereal  nature  of  Walt  Whitman 
is  marvellous  to  us,  but  perhaps  not  so  to  a  nation  from  which 
the  spirit-rappers  sprung. 

I  depart  as  air,  I  shake  my  white  locks  at  the  runaway  sun, 
I  ett'use  my  flesh  in  eddies,  and  drift  it  in  lacy  jags; 
I  bequeath  myself  to  the  dirt,  to  grow  from  the  grass  I  love, 
If  you  want  me  agaip,  look  for  me  under  your  boot-soles. 

Here  is  also  a  sample  of  the  man's  slang  and  vulgarity : 

(Extract.} 

And  here  a  spice  of  his  republican  insolence,  his  rank  Yan- 
keedom,  and  his  audacious  trifling  with  death : 

Dig  out  King  George's  coffin,  unwrap  him  quick  from  the  grave-clothes,  box  up 

his  bones  for  a  journey, 

Find  a  swift  Yankee  clipper:  nere  is  freight  for  you,  black-bellied  clipper, 
Up  with  your  anchor!  shake  out  your  sails !  steer  straight  toward  Boston  Bay. 

The  committee  open  the  box  and  set  up  the  regal  ribs,  and  glue  those  that  will 

not  stay, 
And  clap  the  skull  on  top  of  the  ribs,  and  clap  a  crown  on  top  of  the  skull. 

We  will  neither  weary  nor  insult  our  readers  with  more  ex- 


LEAVES  OF  GRASS   IMPRINTS.  45 

tracts  from  this  notable  book.  Emerson  has  praised  it,  and 
called  it  the  "most  extraordinary  piece  of  wit  and  wisdom 
America  has  yet  contributed."  Because  Emerson  has  grasped 
substantial  fame,  he  can  afford  to  be  generous,  but  Emer 
son's  generosity  must  not  be  mistaken  for  justice.  If  this  work 
is  really  a  work  of  genius  —  if  the  principles  of  those  poems, 
their  free  language,  their  amazing  and  audacious  egotism,  their 
animal  vigor,  be  real  poetry  and  the  divinest  evidence  of  the 
true  poet  —  then  our  studies  have  been  in  vain,  and  vainer  still 
the  homage  which  we  have  paid  the  monarchs  of  Saxon  intel 
lect —  Shakspeare,  and  Milton,  and  Byron.  This  Walt  Whit 
man  holds  that  his  claim  to  be  a  poet  lies  in  his  robust  and  rude 
health.  He  is,  in  fact,  as  he  declares,  "  the  poet  of  the  body." 
Adopt  this  theory,  and  Walt  Whitman  is  a  Titan  ;  Shelley  and 
Keats  the  merest  pigmies.  If  we  had  commenced  a  notice  of 
"  LEAVES  OF  GRASS  "  in  anger,  we  could  not  but  dismiss  it  in 
grief,  for  its  author,  we  have  just  discovered,  is  conscious  of  his 
affliction.  He  says,  at  page  33, 

lam  given  up  by  traitors; 
Italic  wildly \  1  am  mad. 


From  the  Examiner.    (London,  England,  1857.) 
LEAVES  OF  GRASS.    Brooklyn,  New  York. 

We  have  too  long  overlooked  in  this  country  the  great  poet 
who  has  recently  arisen  in  America,  of  whom  some  of  his  coun 
trymen  speak  in  connection  with  Bacon  and  Shakspeare  ;  whom 
others  compare  with  Tennyson  —  much  to  the  disadvantage  of 
our  excellent  laureate  —  and  to  whom  Mr.  Emerson  writes  that 
he  finds  in  his  book  "  incomparable  things,  said  incomparably 
well."  The  book  he  pronounces  "  the  most  extraordinary  piece 
of  wit  and  wisdom  that  America  has  yet  contributed  ;  "  at  which, 
indeed,  says  Mr.  Emerson  in  the  printed  letter  sent  to  us  —  "I 
rubbed  my  eyes  a  little,  to  see  if  this  sunbeam  were  no  illusion.'* 

No  illusion  truly  is  Walt  Whitman,  the  new  American  prodi 
gy,  who,  as  he  is  himself  candid  enough  to  intimate,  sounds  his 
barbaric  yawp  over  the  roofs  of  the  world.  He  is  described  by 
one  of  his  own  local  papers  as  *'  a  tenderly  affectionate,  rowdy- 
ish,  contemplative,  sensual,  moral,  susceptible,  and  imperious 
person,"  who  aspires  to  cast  some  of  his  own  grit,  whatever 
that  may  be,  into  literature.  We  have  ourselves  been  disposed 
to  think  there  is  in  literature  grit  enough,  according  to  the 
ordinary  sense,  but  decidedly  Walt  Whitman  tosses  in  some 
more.  The  author  describes  himself  as  "  one  of  the  roughs,  a 
kosmos ; "  indeed,  he  seems  to  be  very  much  impressed  with 
the  fact  that  he  is  a  kosmos,  and  repeats  it  frequently.  A  kos 
mos  we  may  define,  from  the  portrait  of  it  on  the  front  of  the 


46  LEAVES   OF  GRASS  IMPRINTS. 

book,  is  a  gentleman  in  his  shirt-sleeves,  with  one  hand  in  a 
pocket  of  his  pantaloons,  and  his  wide-awake  cocked  with  a 
damme-sir  air  over  his  forehead. 

On  the  other  hand,  according  to  an  American  review  that 
natters  Walt  Whitman,  this  kosmos  is  a  "  compound  of  the  New 
England  transcendentalist  and  New  York  rowdy." 

But  as  such  terms  of  compliment  may  not  be  quite  clear  to 
English  readers,  we  must  be  content,  in  simpler  fashion,  to  de 
scribe  to  them  this  Brooklyn  boy  as  a  wild  Tupper  of  the  West. 
We  can  describe  him  perfectly  by  a  few  suppositions.  Suppose 
that  Mr.  Tupper  had  been  brought  up  to  the  business  of  an 
auctioneer,  then  banished  to  the  backwoods,  compelled  to  live 
for  a  long  time  as  a  backwoodsman,  and  thus  contracting  a 
passion  for  the  reading  of  Emerson  and  Carlyle  ;  suppose  him 
maddened  by  this  course  of  reading,  and  fancying  himself  not 
only  an  Emerson  but  a  Carlyle  and  an  American  Shakspeare  to 
boot,  when  the  fits  come  on,  and  putting  forth  his  notion  of  that 
combination  in  his  own  self-satisfied  way,  and  in  his  own  won 
derful  cadences  ?  In  that  state  he  would  write  a  book  exactly 
like  Walt  Whitman's  "  LEAVES  OF  GRASS." 

(Extracts  and  Interlineated  remarks.) 

We  must  be  just  to  Walt  Whitman  in  allowing  that  he  has 
one  positive  merit.  His  verse  has  a  purpose.  He  desires  to 
assert  the  pleasure  that  a  man  has  in  himself,  his  body  and  its 
sympathies,  his  mind  (in  a  lesser  degree,  however)  and  its  sym 
pathies.  He  asserts  man's  right  to  express  his  delight  in  animal 
enjoyment,  and  the  harmony  in  which  he  should  stand,  body 
and  soul,  with  fellow-men  and  the  whole  universe.  To  express 
this,  and  to  declare  that  the  poet  is  the  highest  manifestation 
of  this,  generally  also  to  suppress  shams,  is  the  purport  of  these 
"  LEAVES  OF  GRASS."  Perhaps  it  might  have  been  done  as 
well,  however,  without  being  always  so  purposely  obscene,  and 
intentionally  foul-mouthed,  as  Walt  Whitman  is. 
(Extracts  and  Interlineations.) 

In  the  construction  of  our  artificial  Whitman,  we  began  with 
the  requirement  that  a  certain  philosopher  should  have  been 
bred  to  the  business  of  an  auctioneer.  We  must  add  now,  to 
complete  the  imitation  of  Walt  Whitman,  that  the  wild  philos 
opher  and  poet,  as  conceived  by  us,  should  be  perpetually  haunt 
ed  by  the  delusion  that  he  has  a  catalogue  to  make.  Three- 
fourths  of  Walt  Whitman's  book  is  poetry  as  catalogues  of 
auctioneers  are  poems.  Whenever  any  general  term  is  used, 
off  the  mind  wanders  on  this  fatal  track,  and  an  attempt  is 
made  to  specify  all  lots  included  under  it.  Does  Walt  Whitman 
speak  of  a  town,  he  is  at  once  ready  with  pages  of  town  lots. 
Does  he  mention  the  American  country,  he  feels  bound  there 
upon  to  draw  up  a  list  of  barns,  wagons,  wilds,  mountains, 


LEAVES   OF  GRASS   IMPRINTS.  47 

animals,  trees,  people,  "  a  Hoosier,  a  Badger,  a  Buckeye,  a 
Louisianian  or  Georgian,  a  poke-easy  from  sand-hills  and 
pines,"  &c.,  &c.  We  will  give  an  illustration  of  this  form  of 
lunacy.  The  subject  from  which  the  patient  starts  off  is  equiv 
alent  to  things  in  general,  and  we  can  spare  room  only  for  half 
the  catalogue.  It  will  be  enough,  however,  to  show  how  there 
arises  catalogue  within  catalogue,  and  how  sorely  the  paroxysm 
is  aggravated  by  the  incidental  mention  of  any  one  particular 
that  is  itself  again  capable  of  subdivision  into  lots. 

The  usual  routine,  the  workshop,  factory,  yard,  office,  store,  or  desk; 
The  jaunt  of  hunting  or  fishing,  or  the  life  of  hunting  or  fishing, 
Pasture-life,  foddering,  milking  and  herding,  and  all  the  personnel  and  usages; 
The  plum-orchard  and  apple-orchard,  gardening,  seedlings,  cuttings,  flowers 

and  vines, 
Grains  and  manures,  marl,  clay,  loam,  the  subsoil  plough,  the  shovel  and  pick 

and  rake  and  hoe,  irrigation  and  draining; 
The  currycomb,  the  horse-cloth,  the  halter  and  bridle  and  bits,  the  very  wisps 

of  straw, 

The  barn  and  barn-yard,  the  bins  and  mangers,  the  mows  and  racks; 
Manufactures,  commerce,  engineering,  the  building  of  cities,  and  every  trade 

carried  on  there,  and  the  implements  of  every  trade. 

(Extract  continued.) 

Now  let  us  compare  with  this  a  real  auctioneer's  catalogue. 
We  will  take  that  of  Goldsmith's  chambers,  by  way  of  depart 
ing  as  little  as  we  can  from  the  poetical.  For,  as  Walt  Whit 
man  would  say  (and  here  we  quote  quite  literally,  prefixing 
only  a  verse  of  our  own,  from  "  A  Catalogue  of  the  Household 
Furniture  with  the  select  collection  of  scarce,  curious,  and  val 
uable  books  of  Dr.  Goldsmith,  deceased,  which  by  order  of  the 
admr,  will  "be  sold  by  auction,"  &c.,  &c.) 

(The  Examiner's  burlesque  of  Walt  Whitman.) 

Surely  the  house  of  a  poet  is  a  poem,  and  behold  a  poet  in  the  auctioneer  who 

tells  you  the  whole  lot  of  it  — 

The  bath  stone,  compass  front,  open  border,  fender,  shovel,  tongs,  and  poker, 
The  blue  moreen  festoon  window-curtain,  the  mahogany  dining-table  on  the 

floor, 

The  six  ditto  hollow  seat  chairs  covered  with  blue  moreen, 
Covered  with  blue  moreen  and  finished  with  a  double  row  of  brass  nails  and 

check  cases, 

The  Wilton  carpet,  sun  shade,  line  and  pulleys,  the  deal  sideboard  stained, 
The  teapot,  five  coffee  cups,  sugar  basin  and  cover,  four  saucers  and  six  cups, 
Two  quart  decanters  and  stoppers,  one  plain  ditto,  eleven  glasses,  one  wine  and 

water  glass, 

A  pair  of  bellows  and  a  brush,  a  footman,  copper  tea-kettle  and  coal-scuttle. 
Two  pairs  of  plated  candlesticks, 
A  mahogany  teaboard,  a  pet  bordered  ditto,  a  large  round  japanned  ditto  and 

two  waiters. 
The  Tragic  Muse  in  a  gold  frame. 

After  all,  we  are  not  sure  whether  the  poetry  of  that  excellent 
Mr.  Good,  the  auctioneer  who,  at  his  Great  Room,  No.  121 
Fleet  Street,  sold  the  household  furniture  of  Oliver  Goldsmith 
in  the  summer  of  1774,  does  not  transcend  in  wisdom  and  in 
wit,  '  the  most  extraordinary  piece  of  wit  and  wisdom  that " 
(according  to  Mr.  Emerson)  "  America  has  yet  contributed." 


48  LEAVES   OF   GRA66   IMPRINTS. 

From  the  London  Leader.    (1857.) 
TRANSATLANTIC   LATTER-DAY  POETRY. 

LEAVES  OF  GRASS.      Brooklyn,  New  York,   1855.     London: 
Horsell. 

"  Latter-day  poetry  "  in  America  is  of  a  very  different  char 
acter  from  the  same 'manifestation  in  the  old  country.  Here  it 
is  occupied  for  the  most  part  with  dreams  of  the  middle  ages,  of 
the  old  knightly  and  religious  times  ;  in  America  it  is  employed 
chiefly  with  the  present,  except  when  it  travels  out  into  the  un 
discovered  future.  Here  our  latter-day  poets  are  apt  to  whine 
over  the  times,  as  if  heaven  were  perpetually  betraying  the  earth 
with  a  show  of  progress  that  is  in  fact  -^retrogression,  like  the 
backward  advance  of  crabs ;  there,  the  minstrels  of  the  stars 
and  stripes  blow  a  loud  note  of  exultation  before  the  grand 
new  epoch,  and  think  the  Greeks  and  Romans,  the  early  Orien 
tal  races,  and  the  later  men  of  the  middle  centuries,  of  small 
account  before  the  onward  tramping  of  these  present  genera 
tions.  Of  this  latter  sect  is  a  certain  phenomenon  who  has  re 
cently  started  up  in  Brooklyn,  New  York  —  one  Walt  Whitman, 
author  of  "LEAVES  OF  GRASS,"  who  has  been  received  by  a 
section  of  his  countrymen  as  a  sort  of  prophet,  and  by  English 
men  as  a  kind  of  fool.  For  ourselves,  we  are  not  disposed  to 
accept  him  as  the  one,  having  less  faith  in  latter-day  prophets 
than  in  latter-day  poets ;  but  assuredly  we  cannot  regard  him 
as  the  other.  Walt  is  one  of  the  most  amazing,  one  of  the  most 
startling,  one  of  the  most  perplexing  creations  of  the  modern 
American  mind ;  but  he  is  no  fool,  though  abundantly  eccen 
tric,  nor  is  his  book  mere  food  for  laughter,  though  undoubt 
edly  containing  much  that  may  easily  and  fairly  be  turned  into 
ridicule. 

The  singularity  of  the  author's  mind  —  his  utter  disregard  of 
ordinary  forms  and  modes — appears  in  the  very  title-page  and 
frontispiece  of  his  work.  Not  only  is  there  no  author's  name, 
(which  in  itself  would  not  be  singular,)  but  there  is  no  publish 
er's  name — that  of  the  English  bookseller  being  a  London  ad 
dition.  Fronting  the  title  is  a  portrait  of  a  bearded  gentleman 
in  his  shirt-sleeves  and  a  Spanish  hat,  with  an  all-pervading 
atmosphere  of  Yankee-doodle  about  him ;  but  again  there  is  no 
patronymic,  and  we  can  only  infer  that  this  roystering  blade  is 
the  author  of  the  book.  Then  follows  a  long  prose  treatise  by 
way  of  preface  (and  here  once  more  the  anonymous  system  is 
carried  out,  the  treatise  having  no  heading  whatever  ;  )  and  af 
ter  that  we  have  the  poem,  in  the  course  of  which  a  short  auto 
biographical  discourse  reveals  to  us  the  name  of  the  author. 
(Extract  from  Preface.) 

The  poem  is  written*  in  wild,  irregular,  unrhymed,  almost 


LEAVES   OP  GRASS  IMPRINTS.  49 

unmetrical  "lengths,"  like  the  measured  prose  of  Mr.  Martin 
Farquhar  Tupper's  Proverbial  Philosophy,  or  some  of  the  Ori 
ental  writings.  The  external  form,  therefore,  is  startling,  and 
by  no  means  seductive  to  English  ears,  accustomed  to  the 
sumptuous  music  of  ordinary  metre ;  and  the  central  principle 
of  the  poem  is  equally  staggering.  It  seems  to  resolve  itself 
into  an' all-attracting  egotism  —  an.  eternal  presence  of  the  indi 
vidual  soul  of  Walt  Whitman  in  all  things,  yet  in  such  wise 
that  this  one  soul  shall  be  presented  as  a  type  of  all  human 
souls  whatsoever.  He  goes  forth  into  the  world,  this  rough, 
devil-may-care  Yankee ;  passionately  identifies  himself  with  all 
forms  of  being,  sentient  or  inanimate;  sympathizes  deeply  with 
humanity  ;  riots  with  a  kind  of  Bacchanal  fury  in  the  force  and 
fervor  of  his  own  sensations ;  will  not  have  the  most  vicious  or 
abandoned  shut  out  from  final  comfort  and  reconciliation ;  is 
delighted  with  Broadway,  New  York,  and  equally  in  love  with 
the  desolate  backwoods,  and  the  long  stretch  of  the  uninhabit 
ed  prairie,  where  the  wild  beasts  wallow  in  the  reeds,  and  the 
wilder  birds  start  upward  from  their  nests  among  the  grass ; 
perceives  a  divine  mystery  wherever  his  feet  conduct,  or  his 
thoughts  transport  him ;  and  beholds  all  things  tending  toward 
the  central  and  sovereign  Me.  Such,  as  we  conceive,  is  the  key 
to  this  strange,  grotesque,  and  bewildering  book ;  yet  we  are 
far  from  saying  that  the  key  will  unlock  all  the  quirks  and  oddi 
ties  of  the  volume.  Much  remains  of  which  we  confess  we  can 
make  nothing ;  much  that  seems  to  us  purely  fantastical  and 
preposterous;  much  that  appears  to  our  muddy  vision  gratui 
tously  prosaic,  needlessly  plain-speaking,  disgusting  without 
purpose,  and  singular  without  result.  There  are  so  many  evi 
dences  of  a  noble  soul  in  Whitman's  pages  that  we  regret  these 
aberrations,  which  only  have  the  effect  of  discrediting  what  is 
genuine  by  the  show  of  something  false ;  and  especially  do  we 
deplore  the  unnecessary  openness  with  which  Walt  reveals  to 
us  matters  which  ought  rather  to  remain  in  sacred  silence.  It 
is  good  not  to  be  ashamed  of  Nature ;  it  is  good  to  have  an  all- 
inclusive  charity ;  but  it  is  also  good,  sometimes,  to  leave  the 
veil  across  the  Temple. 

From  the  Brooklyn  Daily  Times.  (1856.) 
LEAVES  OF  GRASS,  —  Brooklyn,  N.  Y.  — 1856. 

This  is  a  new,  enlarged  and  stereotyped,  edition  of  that  sin 
gular:  production  of  "  Walt  Whitman,"  whose  first  appearance, 
in  185f5,  created  such  an  extraordinary  sensation  in  the  literary 
world  on  both  sides  of  the  Atlantic.  The  first  edition  —  which 
was  dnly  noticed  in  these  columns  —  contained  twelve  poems. 
In  the  present  edition  those  poems  are  revised,  and  twenty 
4 


50  LEAVES   OF   Gil  ASS   IMPRINTS. 

others   are  added.     The  form  of  the  book  has  been  changed 
from  4to.  to  16mo.,  and  the  typography  is  much  improved. 

The  work,  in  its  singular  character,  we  understand  to  be  an 
assertion  of  a  two-fold  individuality  for  the  author :  of  himself 
personally,  and  of  himself  nationally ;  and  the  author,  by  exam 
ple  at  least,  to  be  an  advocate  of  as  much  for  all  of  his  nation. 
A  bold  example  he  sets.  The  titles  of  the  poems  are  various, 
and  the  poems  under  them  present  differences;  yet  through 
them  all,  with  whatever  else,  runs  one  vital  view  ;  one  ontologi- 
cal  lesson  in  the  same  idiosyncratic  strain. 

Fanciful,  fertile,  and  free  in  words,  yet  often,  conventionally 
speaking,  inelegant,  and  sometimes  downright  low ;  simple,  ab 
rupt,  and  detached  sentences  ;  frequently  aphoristic,  yet  diffuse 
and  uniform,  sometimes  to  tediousness;  at  times  strikingly 
clear  and  forcible,  and  again  impenetrably  obscure  ;  a  meeting 
of  the  extremes  of  literalness  and  meteleptic  figures — of  tire 
some  superficial  details  and  comprehensive  subtle  generalities, 
oddities,  ruggedness  and  strength ;  these  are  the  chief  charac 
teristics  of  his  style.  There  occur  frequent  instances  of  all- 
important  and  majestic  thought,  and  so  fitly  expressed  that  the 
dissonance  to  the  unaccustomed  ears  of  the  reader  cannot  pre 
vent  his  stopping  to  admire.  The  matter  is  characterized  by 
thought  rather  than  by  sentiment.  The  right  and  duty  of  man 
with  the  passions  are  enjoined  and  celebrated,  rather  than  the 
passions  themselves.  There  are  speculative  philosophies  ad 
vanced,  upon  which  readers  will  differ  with  the  author  and  with 
each  other ;  and  some  of  these  to  intolerant  conventionalists 
will  give  offence.  We  are  not  prepared  to  indorse  them  all  our 
selves.  And  there  are  practical  philosophies  of  which  he  treats, 
destined  to  encounter  fiercer  repugnance.  But  the  book  is  not 
one  that  warrants  its  dismissal  with  disgust  or  contempt.  There 
is  a  deep  substratum  of  observant  and  contemplative  wisdom,  as 
broad  as  the  foundation  of  society,  running  through  it  all ;  and 
whatever  else  there  is  of  questionable  good,  so  much  at- least  is 
a  genuine  pearl  that  we  cannot  afford  to  trample  under  our  feet. 
The  poems  contain  some  lessons  of  the  highest  importance, 
and  possess  a  further  value  in  their  strong  suggestiveness.  We 
accord  to  the  leading  idea  of  the  work  alone,  personal  and  na 
tional  individuality,  exemplified  and  recommended  as  it  is,  an 
incalculable  value.  The  poems  improve  upon  a  second  reading, 
and  they  may  commonly  require  a  repetition  in  order  to  a  de 
served  appreciation,  like  a  strange  piece  of  music  with  subtle 
harmonies. 

The  work  is  altogether  sui  generis,  unless  we  call  it  Emer 
sonian.  That  name  is  ample  enough  to  cover  a  multitude  of 
oddities  and  excellences ;  but  that  it  is  not  shaped  to  all  the 
radiations  of  the  unbridled  muse  of  the  author  under  notice  we 
think  a  single  extract  from  his  first  poem  will  show. 
(Extracts.') 


LEAVES    OF   GRASS    IMPRINTS.  51 

From  the  Monthly  Trade  Gazette.    (New  York,  1856.) 
LEAVES    OP    GRASS.      By  Walt  Whitman.      A  poem    thnt 
deserves  and  will  eventually  obtain  a  higher  niche  in  Fame's 

temple,   than    all    the  " s "    ever    written.     There   is   a 

sturdy  strength  —  a  far-reaching  grasp  of  Titanic  thought, 
boldly,  manfully,  and  appositely  expressed  —  and  a  fillibuster- 
like  daring  running,  like  a  strong,  vigorous  river,  through  its 
diction,  which  impress  the  reader  with  the  conviction  that  he  is 
in  the  presence  of  a  more  than  ordinary  man.  The  poem  is 
written  without  regard  to  metrical  rules,  which  the  author  evi 
dently  looks  upon  as  puerile  —  in  which  we  think  he  is  nearer 
right  than  wrong  —  but  it  bears  in  eveiy  line  the  stamp  of  rude 
but  sterling  genius.  The  mean  manner  in  which  it  is  put  forth 
by  its  publishers,  however,  will  seriously  interfere  with  its 
chances  of  publicity.  Had  it  been  issued  in  a  dress  worthy  of 
the  matter,  it  could  hardly  fail  of  mounting,  at  a  single  step,  to 
the  topmost  floor  of  Novelty's  platform,  and  instantly  command 
ing  the  public  eye.  As  it  is,  its  success  will  be  a  work  of  time. 
We  give  a  cordial  greeting  to  Leaves  of  Grass,  which  we  look 
upon  as  the  most  considerable  poem  that  has  yet  appeared  in 
our  country. 

From  "Fourteen  Thousand  Miles  Afoot."  (N.  Y,  1859.) 
Nothing  can  more  clearly  demonstrate  the  innate  vulgarity 
of  our  American  people,  their  radical  immodesty,  their  internal 
licentiousness,  their  unchastity  of  heart,  their  foulness  of  feel 
ing,  than  the  tabooing  of  Walt  Whitman's  "  Leaves  of  Grass." 
It  is  quite  impossible  to  find  a  publisher  for  thie  new  edition 
which  has  long  since  been  ready  for  the  press,  so  measureless  is 
the  depravity  of  public  taste.  There  is  not  an  indecent  word, 
an  immodest  expression,  in  the  entire  volume;  not  a  sugges 
tion  which  is  not  purity  itself;  and  yet  it  is  rejected  on  account 
of  its  indecency  !  So  much  do  I  think  of  this  work  by  the  heal 
thiest  and  most  original  poet  America  has  produced,  so  valuable 
a  means  is  it  of  rightly  estimating  character,  that  I  have  been 
accustomed  to  try  with  it  of  what  quality  was  the  virtue  my 
friends  possessed.  How  few  stood  the  test  I  shall  not  say. 
Some  did,  and  praised  it  beyond  measure.  These  I  set  down 
without  hesitation  as  radically  pure,  as  "born  again,"  and  fitted 
for  the  society  of  heaven  and  the  angels.  And  this  test  I  would 
recommend  to  every  one.  Would  you,  reader,  male  or  female, 
ascertain  if  you  be  actually  modest,  innocent,  pure-minded? 
read  the  "Leaves  of  Grass."  If  you  find  nothing  improper 
there,  you  are  one  of  the  virtuous  and  pure.  If,  on  the  con 
trary,  you  find  your  sense  of  decency  shocked,  then  is  that  sense 
of  decency  an  exceedingly  foul  one,  and  you,  man  or  woman,  a 
very  vulgar,  dirty  person. 


52  LEAVES   OF   GRASS   IMPRINTS. 

The  atmosphere  of  the  "  Leaves  of  Grass  "  is  as  sweet  as 
that  of  a  hay-field.  Its  pages  exhale  the  fragrance  of  nature. 
It  takes  you  back  to  man's  pristine  state  of  innocence  in  Para 
dise,  and  lifts  you  Godwards.  It  is  the  healthiest  book,  morally, 
this  century  has  produced ;  and  if  it  were  reprinted  in  the  form 
of  a  cheap  tract,  and  scattered  broadcast  over  the  land,  put  into 
the  hands  of  youth,  and  into  the  hands  of  men  and  women 
everywhere,  it  would  do  more  towards  elevating  our  nature,  to 
wards  eradicating  this  foul,  vulgar,  licentious,  sham  modesty, 
which  so  degrades  our  people  now,  than  any  other  means  within 
my  knowledge,  What  we  want  is  not  outward,  but  inward 
modesty,  not  external,  but  internal  virtue,  not  silk  and  broad 
cloth  decency,  but  a  decency  infused  into  every  organ  of  the 
body  and  faculty  of  the  soul.  Is  modesty  a  virtue  ?  Is  it  then 
worn  in  clothes  ?  Does  it  hang  over  the  shoulders,  or  does  it 
live  and  breathe  in  the  heart  ?  Our  modesty  is  a  Jewish  phy 
lactery,  sewed  up  in  the  padding  of  a  coat,  and  stitched  into  a 
woman's  stays. 

From  the  Brooklyn  Daily  Eagle.    (1856.) 
"LEAVES  OF  GRASS,"— AN  EXTRAORDINARY  BOOK. 

Here  we  have  a  book  which  fairly  staggers  us.  It  sets  all  the 
ordinary  rules  of  criticism  at  defiance.  It  is  one  of  the  stran 
gest  compounds  of  transcendentalism,  bombast,  philosophy, 
folly,  wisdom,  wit,  and  dulness  which  it  ever  entered  into  the 
heart  of  man  to  conceive.  Its  author  is  Walt  Whitman,  and 
the  book  is  a  reproduction  of  the  author.  His  name  is  not 
on  the  frontispiece,  but  his  portrait,  half  length,  is.  The  con 
tents  of  the  book  form  a  daguerreotype  of  his  inner  being,  and 
the  title  page  bears  a  representation  of  its  physical  tabernacle.- 
It  is  a  poem  ;  but  it  conforms  to  none  of  the  rules  by  which 
poetry  has  ever  been  judged.  It  is  not  an  epic,  nor  an  ode,  nor 
a  lyric ;  nor  does  its  verse  move  with  the  measured  pace  of 
poetical  feet  —  of  iambic,  trochaic,  or  anapestic,  nor  seek  the 
aid  of  amphibrach,  of  dactyl,  or  spondee,  nor  of  final  or  cesu- 
ral  pause,  except  by  accident.  But  we  had  better  give  Walt's 
own  conception  of  what  a  poet  of  the  age  and  country  should 
be.  We  quote  from  the  preface  : 

"  His  spirit  responds  to  his  country's  spirit;  he  incarnates  its  geography  and 
natural  life,  and  rivers  and  lakes.  Mississippi  with  annual  freshets  and  changing 
chutes  — Missouri,  and  Columbia,  and  Ohio,  and  the  beautiful  masculine  Hud 
son,  do  not  embouchure  where  they  spend  themselves  more  than  they  embou 
chure  into  him.  The  blue  breadth  over  the  inland  sea  of  Virginia  and  Maryland, 
and  the  sea  off  Massachusetts  and  Maine,  and  over  Manhattan  Bay,  over  Cham- 
plain  and  Erie,  and  over  Ontario  and  Huron,  and  Michigan  and  Superior,  and 
over  the  Texan,  and  Mexican,  and  Floridian,  and  Cuban  seas,  and  over  the  seas 
off  California  and  Oregon  —  is  not  tallied  by  the  blue  breadth  of  the  wateus  below, 
more  than  the  breadth  of  above  and  below  is  tallied  by  him." 

*    *    *    "To  him  enter  the  essence  of  the  real  things,  and  past  and  present 


LEAVES  OF  GRASS  IMPRINTS.  53 

events  — of  the  enormous  diversity  of  temperature,  and  agriculture,  and  mines  — 
the  tribes  of  red  aborigines  — the  weather-beaten  vessels  entering  new  ports  or 
making  landings  on  rocky  coasts  — the  first  settlement  North  and  South— the 
rapid  stature  and  muscle  — the  haughty  defiance  of  76,  and  the  war,  and  peace, 
and  formation  of  the  constitution  —  the  Union  always  surrounded  by  blather- 
crs,  and  always  calm  and  impregnable  —  the  immigrants  —  the  wharf-hemmed 
cities  and  superior  marine  —  the  nnsurveyed  interior —  the  log  houses,  and  clear 
ings,  and  wild  animals,  and  hunters,  and  trappers  —  the  free  commerce,  the  fish 
ing,  and  whaling,  and  gold  digging  — the  endless  gestation  of  new  States  — the 
convening  of  Congress  every  December,  the  members  duly  coming  up  from  all  cli 
mates  and  the  uttermost  parts  — the  noble  characteriof  the  young  mechanics,  and 
of  all  free  American  workmen  and  workwomen  —  the  general  ardor,  and  friend 
liness,  and  enterprise  —  the  perfect  equality  of  the  female  with  the  male  — the 
large  amativeness  — the  fluid  movement  of  the  population,"  &c.  *  *  *  "For 
euch  the  expression  of  the  American  poet  is  to  be  transcendent  and  new." 

And  the  poem  seems  to  accord  with  the  ideas  here  laid  down. 
No  drawing-room  poet  is  the  author  of  the  '•  Leaves  of  Grass ;  " 
he  prates  not  of  guitar-thrumming  under  ladies'  windows,  nor 
deals  in  the  extravagances  of  sentimentalism  ;  no  pretty  con 
ceits  or  polished  fancies  are  tacked  together  "like  orient  pearls 
at  random  strung ; "  but  we  have  the  free  utterance  of  an  un 
trammelled  spirit  without  the  slightest  regard  to  established 
models  or  fixed  standards  of  taste.  His  scenery  presents  no 
shaven  lawns  or  neatly  trimmed  arbors;  no  hothouse  conser 
vatory,  where  delicate  exotics  odorize  the  air  and  enchant  the 
eye.  If  we  follow  the  poet  we  must  scale  unknown  precipices 
and  climb  untrodden  mountains ;  or  we  boat  on  nameless  lakes, 
encountering  probably  rapids  and  waterfalls,  and  start  wild 
fowls  never  classified  by  Wilson  or  Audubon  ;  or  we  wander 
among  primeval  forests,  now  pressing  the  yielding  surface  of 
velvet  moss,  and  anon  caught  among  thickets  and  brambles. 
He  believes  in  the  ancient  philosophy  that  there  is  no  more 
real  beauty  or  merit  in  one  particle  of  matter  than  another  ;  he 
appreciates  all ;  everything  is  right  that  is  in  its  place,  and 
everything  is  wrong  that  is  not  in  its  place.  He  is  guilty,  not 
only  of  breaches  of  conventional  decorum,  but  treats  with  non 
chalant  defiance  what  goes  by  the  name  of  refinement  and  deli 
cacy  of  feeling  and  expression.  Whatever  is  natural  he  takes 
to  his  heart;  whatever  is  artificial  —  in  the  frivolous  sense  —  he 
makes  of  no  account.  The  following  description  of  himself  is 
more  truthful  than  many  self-drawn  pictures  : 

"Apart  from  the  pulling  and  hauling,  stands  what  I  am, 
Stands  amused,  complacent,  compassionating,  idle,  unitary^ 
Looks  down,  is  erect,  bends  an  arm  on  an  impalpable  certain  rest, 
Looks  with  its  side-curved  head,  curious  what  will  come,  next, 
Both  in  and  out  of  the  game,  and  watching  and  wondering  at  it." 

As  a  poetic  interpretation  of  nature,  we  believe  the  following 
is  not  surpassed  in  the  range  of  poetry : 

*'  A  child  said,  What  is  the  grass?  fetching  it  to  me  with  full  hands; 
How  could  I  answer  the  child?    I  do  not  know  any  more  than.  he. 
I  guess  it  is  the  handkerchief  of  the  Lord, 
A  scented  gift  and  remembrancer  designedly  dropped, 

Bearing  the  owner's  name  someway  in  the  corners,  that  we  may  see  and  remark, 
and  say,  Whose  ? " 


64  LEAVES   OP   GllASS   IMPRINTS. 

We  are  afforded  glimpses  of  half-formed  pictures  to  tease 
and  tantalize  with  their  indistinctness  ;  like  a  crimson  cheek 
and  flashing  eye  looking  on  us  through  the  leaves  of  an  arbor 
—  mocking  us  for  a  moment,  but  vanishing  before  we  can  reach 
them.  Here  is  an.  example  : 

"  Twenty-eight  young  men  bathe  by  the  shore. 
Twenty-eight  young  men  and  all  so  friendly  ; 
Twenty-eight  years  of  womanly  life  and  all  so  lonesome. 

She  owns  the  fine  house  by  the  rise  of  the  bank  ; 

She  hides  handsome  and  richly  drest  aft  the  blinds  of  the  window. 

Which  of  the  young  men  does  she  like  the  best? 
Ah,  the  homeliest  or  them  is  beautiful  to  her. 

Dancing  and  laughing  along  the  beach  came  the  twenty-ninth  bather; 
The  rest  did  not  see  her,  but  she  saw  them,"  &c. 

Well,  did  the  lady  fall  in  love  with  the  twenty-ninth  bather, 
or  vice  versa  ?  Our  author  scorns  to  gratify  such  puerile  curi 
osity  ;  the  denouement  which  novel  readers  would  expect  is  not 
hinted  at. 

In  his  philosophy  justice  attains  its  proper  dimensions : 

"  I  play  not  a  march  for  victors  only:  I  play  great  marches  for  conquered  and 
plain  persons. 

Have  you  heard  that  it  was  good  to  gain  the  day? 

I  also  say  that  it  is  good  to  fall —  battles  are  lost  in  the  same  spirit  in  which  they 

are  won  ; 
I  sound  triumphal  drums  for  the  dead  —  I  fling  thro'  my  embouchures  the 

loudest  and  gayest  music  for  them. 

Vivas  to  those  who  have  failed  and  to  those  whose  war  vessels  sank  in  the  sea, 
And  to  those  themselves  who  sank  into  the  sea, 

And  to  all  generals  that  lost  engagements,  and  all  overcome  heroes,  and  the 
numberless  unknown  heroes,  equal  to  the  greatest  heroes  known." 

The  triumphs  of  victors  had  been  duly  celebrated,  but  surely 
a  poet  was  needed  to  sing  the  praises  of  the  defeated  whose 
cause  was  righteous,  and  the  heroes  who  had  been  trampled 
under  the  hoofs  of  iniquity's  onward  march. 

He  does  not  pick  and  choose  sentiments  and  expressions  fit 
for  general  circulation  —  he  gives  a  voice  to  whatever  is,  what 
ever  we  see,  and  hear,  and  think,  and  feel.  He  descends  to 
grossness,  which  debars  the  poem  from  being  read  aloud  in  any 
mixed  circle.  We  have  said  that  the  work  defies  criticism ;  we 
pronounce  no  judgment  upon  it;  it  is  a  work  that  will  satisfy 
few  upon  a  first  perusal ;  it  must  be  read  again  and  again,  and 
then  it  will  be  to  many  unaccountable.  All  who  read  it  will 
agree  that  it  is  an  extraordinary  book,  full  of  beauties  and 
blemishes,  such  as  Nature  is  to  those  who  have  only  a  half- 
formed  acquaintance  with  her  mysteries. 


LEAVES   OF  GRASS  IMPRINTS.  65 

From  the  New  York  Oriterivn.    (Nvo.  10, 1855.) 
LEAVES  OF  GRASS,  by  Walt  Whitman.    1855. 

An  unconsidered  letter  of  introduction  has  oftentimes  pro- 
-mred  the  admittance  of  a  scurvy  fellow  into  good  society,  and 
)ur  apology  for  permitting  any  allusion  to  the  above  volume  in 
our  columns  is,  that  it  has  been  unworthily  recommended  by  a 
gentleman  of  wide  repute,  and  might,  on  that  account,  obtain 
access  to  respectable  people,  unless  its  real  character  were  ex 
posed. 

Mr.  Ralph  Waldo  Emerson  either  recognizes  and  accepts 
these  "  leaves,"  as  the  gratifying  result  of  his  own  peculiar 
doctrines,  or  else  he  has  hastily  indorsed  them,  after  a  partial 
and  superficial  reading.  If  it  is  of  any  importance  he  may 
extricate  himself  from  the  dilemma.  We,  however,  believe  that 
this  book  does  express  the  bolder  results  of  a  certain  tran 
scendental  kind  of  thinking,  which  some  may  have  styled  phi 
losophy. 

As  to  the  volume  itself,  we  have  only  to  remark,  that  it  strongly 
fortifies  the  doctrines  of  the  Metempsychosists,  for  it  is  impos 
sible  to  imagine  how  any  man's  fancy  could  have  conceived  such 
a  mass  of  stupid  filth,  unless  he  were  possessed  of  the  soul  of  a 
sentimental  donkey  that  had  died  of  disappointed  love.  This 
poet  (?)  without  wit,  but  with  a  certain  vagrant  wildness,  just 
serves  to  show  the  energy  which  natural  imbecility  is  occasion 
ally  capable  of  under  strong  excitement. 

There  are  too  many  persons,  who  imagine  they  demonstrate 
their  superiority  to  their  fellows,  by  disregarding  all  the  polite 
nesses  and  decencies  of  life,  and,  therefore,  justify  themselves 
in  indulging  the  vilest  imaginings  and  shamefullest  license. 
But  Nature,  abhorring  the  abuse  of  the  capacities  she  has  given 
to  man,  retaliates  upon  him,  by  rendering  extravagant  indul 
gence  in  any  direction  followed  by  an  insatiable,  ever-consum 
ing,  and  never  to  be  appeased  passion. 

Thus,  to  these  pitiful  beings,  virtue  and  honor  are  but  names. 
Bloated  with  self-conceit,  they  strut  abroad  unabashed  in  the 
daylight,  and  expose  to  the  world  the  festering  sores  that  over 
lay  them  like  a  garment.  Unless  we  admit  this  exhibition  to 
be  beautiful,  we  are  at  once  set  down  for  non-progressive  con 
servatives,  destitute  of  the  "inner  light,"  the  far-seeingness 
which,  of  course,  characterizes  those  gifted  individuals.  Now, 
any  one  who  has  noticed  the  tendency  of  thought  in  these  later 
years,  must  be  aware  that  a  quantity  of  this  kind  of  nonsense 
is  being  constantly  displayed.  The  immodesty  of  presumption 
exhibited  by  those  seers;  their  arrogant  pretentiousness;  the 
complacent  smile  with  which  they  listen  to  the  echo  of  their 
own  braying,  should  be,  and  we  believe  is,  enough  to  disgust 
the  great  majority  of  sensible  folks ;  but,  unfortunately,  there 


56  LEAVES   OF   GRASS   IMPRINTS. 

is  a  class  that,  mistaking  sound  for  sense,  attach  some  impor 
tance  to  all  this  rant  and  cant.  These  candid,  these  ingenuous, 
these  honest  "progressionists;"  these  human  diamonds  without 
flaws;  these  men  that  have  come — detest  furiously  all  shams; 
"to  the  pure,  all  things  are  pure ;"  they  are  pure,  and,  con 
sequently,  must  thrust  their  reeking  presence  under  every  man's 
nose. 

They  seem  to  think  that  man  has  no  instinctive  delicacy ;  is 
not  imbued  with  a  conservative  and  preservative  modesty,  that 
acts  as  a  restraint  upon  the  violence  of  passions,  which  for  a 
wise  purpose,  have  been  made  so  strong.  No  !  these  fellows 
have  no  secrets,  no  disguises  ;  no,  indeed !  But  they  do  have, 
conceal  it  by  whatever  language  they  choose,  a  degrading, 
beastly  sensuality,  that  is  fast  rotting  the  healthy  core  of  all 
the  social  virtues. 

There  was  a  time  when  licentiousness  laughed  at  reproval ; 
now  it  writes  essays  and  delivers  lectures.  Once  it  shunned 
the  light;  now  it  courts  attention,  writes  books  showing  how 
grand  and  pure  it  is,  and  prophecies  from  its  lecherous  lips  its 
own  ultimate  triumph. 

Shall  we  argue  with  such  men  ?  Shall  we  admit  them  into 
our  houses,  that  they  may  leave  a  foul  odor,  contaminating  the 
pure,  healthful  air  ?  Or  shall  they  be  placed  in  the  same  cate 
gory  with  the  comparatively  innocent  slave  of  poverty,  ignor 
ance,  and  passion  that  skulks  along  in  the  shadows  of  byways  ; 
even  in  her  deep  degradation  possessing  some  sparks  of  the 
Divine  light,  the  germ  of  good  that  reveals  itself  by  a  sense  of 
shame  ? 

Thus,  then,  we  leave  this  gathering  of  muck  to  the  laws  which, 
certainly,  if  they  fulfil  their  intent,  must  have  power  to  suppress 
such  obscenity.  As  it  is  entirely  destitute  of  wit,  there  is  nc 
probability  that  any  would,  after  this  exposure,  read  it  in  the " 
hope  of  finding  that ;  and  we  trust  no  one  will  require  further 
evidence  —  for,  indeed,  we  do  not  believe  there  is  a  newspaper 
so  vile  that  would  print  confirmatory  extracts. 

In  our  allusion  to  this  book,  we  have  found  it  impossible  to 
convey  any,  even  the  most  faint  idea  of  its  style  and  contents, 
and  of  our  disgust  and  detestation  of  them,  without  employing 
language  that  cannot  be  pleasing  to  ears  polite  ;  but  it  does 
seem  that  some  one  should,  under  circumstances  like  these, 
undertake  a  most  disagreeable,  yet  stern  duty.  The  records 
of  crime  show  that  many  monsters  have  gone  on  in.  impunity, 
because  the  exposure  of  their  vileness  was  attended  with  too  - 
great  indelicacy.  Peccatum  illud  horribile,  inter  Christianas 
non  nominandum. 


LEAVES   OP   GRASS   IMPRINTS.  57 

From  the  Cincinnati  Commercial.    (1860.) 
WALT  WHITMAN'S  POEM. 

The  author  of  "  Leaves  of  Grass  "  has  perpetrated  another 
"  poem."  The  N.  Y.  Saturday  Press,  in  whose  columns,  we  re 
gret  to  say,  it  appears,  calls  it  "  a  curious  warble."  Curious,  it 
may  be  ;  but  warble  it  is  not,  in  any  sense  of  that  mellifluous 
word.  It  is  a  shade  less  heavy  and  vulgar  than  the  u  Leaves  of 
Grass,"  whose  unmitigated  badness  seemed  to  cap  the  climax 
of  poetic  nuisances.  But  the  present  performance  has  all  the 
emptiness,  without  half  the  grossness,  of  the  author's  former 
efforts. 

How  in  the  name  of  all  the  Muses  this  so-called  "  poem  " 
ever  got  into  the  columns  of  the  Saturday  Press,  passes  our 
poor  comprehension.  "VVe  had  come  to  look  upon  that  journal 
as  the  prince  of  literary  weeklies,  the  arbiter  elegantiarwn  of 
dramatic  and  poetic  taste,  into  whose  well-filled  columns  nothing 
stupid  or  inferior  could  intrude.  The  numerous  delicious  po 
ems;  the  sparkling  bon  mots;  the  puns,  juicy  and  classical, 
which  almost  redeemed  that  vicious  practice,  and  raised  it  to 
the  rank  of  a  fine  art ;  the  crisp  criticisms,  and  delicate  dra 
matic  humors  of  "  Personne,"  and  the  charming  piquancies  of 
the  spirituelle  Ada  Clare  —  all  united  to  make  up  a  paper  of 
rare  excellence.  And  it  is  into  this  gentle  garden  of  the  Muses 
that  that  unclean  cub  of  the  wilderness,  Walt  Whitman,  has 
been  suffered  to  intrude,  trampling  with  his  vulgar  and  profane 
hoofs  among  the  delicate  flowers  which  bloom  there,  and  soiling 
the  spotless  white  of  its  fair  columns  with  lines  of  stupid  and 
meaningless  twaddle. 

Perhaps  our  readers  are  blissfully  ignorant  of  the  history  and 
achievements  of  Mr.  Walt  Whitman.  Be  it  known,  then,  that 
he  is  a  native  and  resident  of  Brooklyn,  Long  Island,  born  and 
bred  in  an  obscurity  from  which  it  were  well  he  never  had 
emerged.  A  person  of  coarse  nature,  and  strong,  rude  passions, 
he  has  passed  his  life  in  cultivating,  not  the  amenities,  but 
the  rudenesses  of  character ;  and  instead  of  tempering  his  native 
ferocity  with  the  delicate  influences  of  art  and  refined  litera 
ture,  he  has  studied  to  exaggerate  his  deformities,  and  to  thrust 
into  his  composition  all  the  brute  force  he  could  muster  from  a 
capacity  not  naturally  sterile  in  the  elements  of  strength.  He 
has  undertaken  to  be  an  artist,  without  learning  the  first  prin 
ciple  of  art,  and  has  presumed  to  put  forth  "  poems,"  without 
possessing  a  spark  of  the  poetic  faculty.  He  affects  swagger 
and  independence,  and  blurts  out  his  vulgar  impertinence  un 
der  a  full  assurance  of  "  originality." 

In  his  very  first  performance,  this  truculent  tone  was  mani 
fested.  He  exaggerated  every  sentiment,  and  piled  up  with 
endless  repetition  every  epithet,  till  the  reader  grew  weary,  even 


58  LEAVES  OF  GRASS   IMPRINTS. 

to  nausea,  of  his  unmeaning  rant.  He  announces  himself  to 
the  world  as  a  new  and  striking  thinker,  who  had  something  to 
reveal.  His  "  Leaves  of  Grass  "  were  a  revelation  from  the 
Kingdom  of  Nature.  Thus  he  screams  to  a  gaping  universe : 

"I,  Walt  Whitman,  an  American,  one  of  the  roughs,  a  Cosmos;  I  shout  my 
voice  high  and  clear  over  the  waves;  I  send  my  barbaric  yawp  over  the  roofs  of 
the  world  I" 

Such  was  the  style  of  his  performance,  only  it  was  disfigured 
by  far  worse  sins  of  morality  than  of  taste."  Never,  since  the 
days  of  Rabelais,  was  there  such  literature  of  uncleanness  as 
some  portions  of  this  volume  exhibited.  All  that  is  beautiful 
and  sacred  in  love  was  dragged  down  to  the  brutal  plane  of  an 
imal  passion,  and  the  writer  appeared  to  revel  in  language  fit 
only  for  the  lips  of  the  Priapus  of  the  old  mythology. 

We  had  hoped  that  the  small  reception  accorded  to  his  first 
performance  had  deterred  Mr.  Whitman  from  fresh  trespasses 
in  the  realms  of  literature.  Several  years  had  passed  away ; 
his  worse  than  worthless  book  had  been  forgotten,  and  we  hoped 
that  this  Apollo  of  the  Brooklyn  marshes  had  returned  to  his 
native  mud.  But  we  grieve  to'say  he  revived  last  week,  and  al 
though  somewhat  changed,  changed  very  little  for  the  better. 
We  do  not  find  so  much  that  is  offensive,  but  we  do  find  a  vast 
amount  of  irreclaimable  drivel  and  inexplicable  nonsense* 

We  have  searched  this  "poem"  through  with  the  serious  and 
deliberate  endeavor  to  find  out  the  reason  of  its  being  written  ; 
to  discover  some  clue  to  the  mystery  of  so  vast  an  expenditure 
of  words.  But  we  honestly  confess  our  utter  inability  to  solve 
the  problem.  It  is  destitute  of  all  the  elements  which  are 
commonly  desiderated  in  poetical  composition ;  it  has  neither 
rhythm  nor  melody,  rhyme  nor  reason,  metre  nor  sense.  We 
do  solemnly  assert,  that  there  is  not  to  be  discovered,  through 
out  the  whole  performance,  so  much  as  the  glimmering  ghost  of 
an  idea.  Here  is  the  proem,  which  the  author,  out  of  his  char 
acteristic  perversity,  insists  upon  calling  the  Pre-verse  : 

"  Out  of  the  rocked  cradle, 

Out  of  the  mocking-bird's  throat,  the  musical  shuttle, 
Out  of  the  boy's  mother's  womb,  and  from  the  nipples  of  her  breasts, 
Out  of  the  Ninth-Month  midnight, 
Over  the  sterile  sea-sands,  and  the  field  beyond,  where  the  child,  leaving  his 

bed,  wandered  alone,  bareheaded,  barefoot, 
Down  from  the  showered  halo  and  the  moonbeams, 

Up  from  the  mystic  play  of  shadows  twining  and  twisting  as  if  they  were  alive, 
Out  from  the  patches  of  briers  and  blackberries, 
From  the  memories  of  the  bird  that  chanted  to  me, 

From  your  memories,  sad  brother  — from  the  fitful  risings  and  fallings  I  heard, 
From  that  night,  infantile,  under  the  yellow  half-moon,  late  risen,  and  swollen 

as  if  with  tears, 

From  those  beginning  notes  of  sickness  and  love,  there  in  the  mist, 
From  the  thousand  responses  in  my  heart,  never  to  cease, 
From  the  myriad  thence-aroused  words, 
From  the  word  stronger  and  more  delicious  than  any, 
From  such,  as  now  they  start,  the  scene  revisiting, 
As  a  flock,  twittering,  rising,  or  overhead  passing, 


LEAVES    OF   GRASS    IMPRINTS.  59 

Borne  hither—  ere  all  eludes  me,  hurriedly, 
A  man  — yet  by  these  tears  a  little  boy  again, 
Throwing  myself  on  the  sand,  I, 
Confronting  the  waves,  sing." 

This  is  like  nothing  we  ever  heard  of  in  literature,  unless  it 
be  the  following  lucid  and  entertaining  composition  : 

"  Once  there  was  an  old  woman  went  into  the  garden  to  get  some  cabbage  to 
make  an  apple  pie.  Just  then  a  great  she-bear  comes  up  and  pops  his  head  into 
the  shop.  •  What,  no  soap!'  So  he  died,  and  she  married  the  barber;  and  there 
was  present  at  the  wedding  the  Jicaninies  and  the  Piccaninies,  and  the  Grand 
Panjandrum  himself,  with  the  little  round  button  at  the  top;  and  they  all  fell  to 
playing  the  game  of  catch  as  catch  can,  till  the  gunpowder  ran  out  of  the  heelB 
of  their  boots." 

The  "poem"  goes  on,  after  the  same  maudlin  manner,  for  a 
hundred  lines  or  more,  in  which  the  interjection  "  O  "  is  em 
ployed  about  five-and- thirty  times,  until  we  reach  the  following 
gem: 

"  Never  again  leave  me  to  be  the  peaceful  child  I  was  before  what  there  in  the 

night, 

By  the  sea,  under  the  yellow  and  sagging  moon, 
The  dusky  demon  aroused,  the  fire,  the  sweet  hell  within, 
The  unknown  want,  the  destiny  of  me." 

O,  but  this  is  bitter  bad  ! 

*'  O  give  me  some  clue  I 

O  if  I  am  to  have  so  much,  let  me  have  more! 
O  a  word!    O  what  is  my  destination? 
O  I  fear  it  is  henceforth  chaos  I " 

There  is  no  doubt  of  it,  we  do  assure  you !  And,  what  is 
more,  it  never  was  anything  else.  Now,  what  earthly  object 
can  there  be  in  writing  and  printing  such  unmixed  and  hopeless 
drivel  as  that  ?  If  there  were  any  relief  to  the  unmeaning  mo 
notony,  some  glimpse  of  fine  fancy,  some  oasis  of  sense,  some 
spark  of  "the  vision  and  the  faculty  divine,"  we  would  not  say 
a  word.  But  we  do  protest,  in  the  name  of  the  sanity  of  the 
human  intellect,  against  being  invited  to  read  such  stuff  as  this, 
by  its  publication  in  the  columns  of  a  highly  respectable  liter 
ary  journal.  What  is  the  comment  of  the  Saturday  Press  it 
self  on  the  "  poem  "  ?  It  says  : 

"Like  the  'Leaves  of  Grass,'  the  purport  of  this  wild  and  plaintive  song,  well 
enveloped,  and  eluding  definition,  is  positive  and  unquestionable,  like  the  effect 
of  music.  The  piece  will  bear  reading  many  times  —  perhaps,  indeed,  only  comes 
forth,  as  from  recesses,  by  many  repetitions." 

Well,  Heaven  help  us,  then,  for  as  we  are  a  living  man,  we 
would  not  read  that  poem  "  many  times "  for  all  the  poetry 
that  was  ever  perpetrated  since  the  morning  stars  sang  together. 
"  Well  enveloped,  and  eluding  definition."  Indeed !  We 
should  think  so.  Foi*  our  part,  we  hope  it  will  remain  "  well 
enveloped  "  till  dooms.day  ;  and  as  for  "  definition,"  all  we  can 
do  in  that  direction  is  to  declare  that  either  that  "  poem  "  is 
nonsense,  or  we  are  a  lunatic. 


60  LEAVES    OF   GliASS    IMPRINTS. 

If  any  of  the  tuneful  Nine  have  ever  descended  upon  Mr. 
Walt  Whitman,  it  must  have  been  long  before  that  gentleman, 
reached  the  present  sphere  of  existence.  His  amorphous  pro 
ductions  clearly  belong  to  that  school  which  it  is  said  that 
neither  gods  nor  men  can  endure.  There  is  no  meaning  dis 
coverable  in  his  writings,  and  if  there  were,  it  would  most  cer 
tainly  not  be  worth  the  finding  out.  He  is  the  laureate  of  the 
empty  deep  of  the  incomprehensible  ;  over  that  immortal  limbo 
described  by  Milton,  he  has  stretched  the  drag-net  of  his  genius  ; 
and  as  he  has  no  precedent  and  no  rival,  so  we  venture  to  hope 
that  he  will  never  have  an  imitator. 


From  the  Brooklyn  City  News.    (1860.) 
A   BALLAD   OF   LONG   ISLAND. 

Admirers  of  Walt  Whitman's  "  Leaves  of  Grass  "  will  find  a 
curious  ballad,  a  new  poem,  after  the  same  rude  and  mystical 
type  of  versification,  in  the  issue  of  that  literary  paper,  the  New 
York  Saturday  Press,  for  to-day.  The  piece  we  allude  to,  "  A 
Child's  Reminiscence,"  has  for  its  locale,  this  island  of  ours, 
under  its  old  aboriginal  name  of  Paumanok.  The  plot  is  a 
simple  one,  founded  on  the  advent  here,  as  occasionally  hap 
pens  on  "the  south  side,"  in  the  breeding  season,  of  a  pair  of 
southern  mocking-birds, 

Two  guests  from  Alabama  —  two  together, 

Whose  nest  by  the  sea-shore,  the  boy-poet  cautiously  watches. 
The  gay  and  wild  notes  of  the  he-bird  are  translated,  until  his 
mate  disappears.  Now  the  song  turns  into  sadness  ;  for 

«'  Thenceforth,  all  that  Spring, 
And  all  that  Summer,  in  the  sound  of  the  sea, 
And  at  night,  under  the  full  of  the  moon,  in  calmer  weather, 
Over  the  hoarse  surging  of  the  sea, 
Or  flitting  from  brier  to  brier  by  day, 

I  saw,  I  heard  at  intervals,  the  remaining  one,  the  he-bird, 
The  solitary  guest  from  Alabama." 

We  will  not  follow  the  poet's  rendering  of  the  bird's  warble  ; 
indeed  the  whele  poem  needs  to  be  read  in  its  entirety  —  and 
several  times  at  that.  We  will,  however,  give  one  detached 
stanzas,  as  a  specimen  of  Walt  Whitman's  versification.  It 
follows  the  bird's  plaintive  notes.  It  brings  rapidly  and  artisti 
cally  together,  in  the  moonlit  midnight,  the  three  leading  char 
acters,  if  we  may  call  them  so,  of  the  poem  —  the  Barefoot 
boy,  the  Mocking-bird,  and  the  Sea,  (the  "  Savage  Old  Mother  :") 


"  The  aria  sinking, 
All  else  continuing  —  the  stars  shining, 


, 

The  winds  blowing  —  the  notes  of  the  wondrous  bird  echoing, 
With  angry  moons  the  fierce  old  mother  yet,  as  ever,  incessantly  moaning, 


LEAVES   OF   GRASS   IMPRINTS.  61 

On  the  sands  of  Paumanok's  shore  gray  and  rustling, 

The  yellow  half-moon,  enlarged,  sagging  down,  drooping,  the  face  of  the  sea 

almost  touching, 
The  boy  ecstatic  —  with  his  hare  feet  the  waves,  with  his  hair  the  atmosphere 

dallying, 

The  love  in  the  heart  pent,  now  loose,  now  at  last  tumultuously  bursting, 
The  aria's  meaning,  the  ears,  the  soul  swiftly  depositing, 
The  strange  tears  down  the  cheeks  coursing, 
The  colloquy  there  —  the  trio  —  each  uttering, 
The  undertone  —  the  savage  old  mother,  incessantly  crying, 
To  the  boy's  soul's  questions  sullenly  timing  —  some  drowned  secret  hissing, 
To  the  outsetting  bard  of  love." 


From  the  N.  Y.  Saturday  Press.     (1860.) 

YOURN  AND   MINE,   AND  ANY-DAY. 

[A  Yawp,  after  Walt  Whitman.'] 

1.  With  antecedents  and  consequents, 

With  our  Fathers,  Mothers,  Aunts,  Uncles,  and  the  family 

at  large  accumulated  by  past  ages, 
With  all  which  would  have  been  nothing  if  anything  were 

not  something  which  everything  is, 
With  Europe,   Asia,   Africa,   America,   Peoria,   and    New 

Jersey, 
With  the  Pre-  Adamite,  the  Yarab,  the  Guebre,  the  Hotten 

tot,  the   Esquimaux,   the   Gorilla,  and  the   Nonde- 

scriptian, 
With  antique  powwowing,  —  with  laws,  jaws,  wars,  and  three- 

tailed  bashaws, 
With  the  butcher,  the  baker,  the  candlestick-maker,  and 

Ralph  Waldo  Carlyle, 
With  the  sale  of  Long  Island  Railway  stock,  —  with  spirit 

ualists,  with  the  yawper,  with  the  organ-grinder  and 

monkey, 
With  everybody  and  everything  in  general  and  nothing  and 

nobody  in  particular,  besides  otherbodies  and  things 

too  numerous  to  mention, 
Yourn  and  Mine  arrived,  —  The  Arrival  arrove,  and  making 

this  Nonsense  : 
This  Nonsense  !  sending  itself  ahead  of  any  sane  compre 

hension  this  side  of  Jordan. 

2.  O,  but  it  is  not  the  Nonsense  —  it  is  Mine,  —  it  is  Yourn, 
We  touch  all  "  effects,"  and  tally  all  bread-sticks, 

We  are  the  Etceteras  and  Soforths,  —  we  easily  include  them, 

and  more  ; 
All  obfusticates  around  us,  —  there  is  as  much  as  possible  of 

a  muchness  ; 
The  entire  system  of  the  universe  discomboborates  around 

us  with  a  perfect  looseness. 


62  LEAVES   OF   GRASS   IMPRINTS. 

As  for  Mine, 

Mine  has  the  idea  of  my  own,  and  what's  Mine  is  my  own, 

and  my  own  is  all  Mine  and  believes  in  it  all, 
Mine  believes  meum  is  true,  and  rejects  nix. 

4.  Has  Mine  forgotten  to  grab  any  part  ? 

Fork  over  then  whoever  and  whatever  is  worth  having,  till 
Mine  gives  a  receipt  in  full. 

5.  Mine  respects  Brahma,  Vishnu,  Mumbo- Jumbo,  and  the  great 

Panjandrum, 

Mine  adopts  things  generally  which  are  claimed  by  Yourn, 
Mine  asserts  that  these  should  have  been  my  own  in  all  past 

days, 

And  that  they  could  not  no  how  have  been  nobody  else's, 
And  that  to-day  is  neither  yesterday  nor  to-morrow,  —  and 

that  I-S  is  is. 

6.  In  the  name  of  Dogberry,  —  and  in  Mine  and  Yourn, — Bosh ! 
And  in  the  name  of  Bombastes  Furioso,  —  and  in  Yourn 

and  Mine,  —  Gas  ! 

7.  Mine  knows  that  Dogberry  was  an  Ass,  and  Bombastes  Fu 

rioso  a  likewise, 
And  that  both  curiously  conjoint  in  the  present  time,  in 

Yourn  and  Mine, 
And  that  where  Mine  is,  or  Yourn  is,  this  present  day,  there 

is  the  centre  of  all  Asimnities, 
And  there  is  the  meaning  to  us,  of  all  that  has  ever  come  of 

Yourn  and  Mine,  or  ever  will  come. 

SAERASMID,  Philadelphia. 


From  "Waifs from  Washington." — by  UMOS. 

WALT  WHITMAN'S  YAWP.  The  review  by  the  Cincinnati 
Commercial  of  Walt  Whitman's  last  yawp,  which  (the  review) 
you  were  frank  enough  to  print  in  your  last  issue,  emboldens 
me  to  speak  my  sentiments.  When  I  opened  the  Press  con 
taining  that  extraordinary  concentration  of  words,  I  said  to 
myself,  here's  something  nice  for  Mrs.  U.  to  listen  to,  this  night, 
after  the  little  U.'s  have  curled  themselves  up  in  bed.  Accord 
ingly,  the  desired  hour  having  arrived,  I  opened  the  Press,  and 
inquired  of  Mrs.  U.  what  she  knew  of  Walt  Whitman,  and  I 
am  happy  to  say,  —  happy,  after  reading  what  the  Cincinnati 
paper  says  about  his  "Leaves  of  Grass,"  — that  she  instantly 
disclaimed  the  remotest  acquaintance  with  any  one  of  that 
name.  "  Then,"  I  proceeded  to  remark,  "  he  must  be  a  poetic 


LEAVES   OF   GRASS   IMPHINTS.  63 

luminary  of  the  first  magnitude  —  a  sort  of  Fresnel  light  — 
who  has  been,  like  Alexander  Smith,  hiding  his  brilliancy  un 
der  dry-goods  boxes  or  flour-barrels,  and  now  blazes  forth  to 
amaze  the  readers  of  the  Saturday  Press,  and  the  rest  of  man 
kind.  Listen ;  it's  good,  or  it  wouldn't  be  here." 

I  began.     .     .     . 

Last  Winter  I  got  on  skates,  my  first  appearance  before  an 
icy  audience  for  fifteen  years. 

Happily  for  me,  I  selected  the  night  and  a  retired  spot.  Un 
happily,  that  the  —  infernal,  I  was  going  to  say,  hyperborean 
is  better  —  hyperborean  idea  ever  entered  my  wretched  head; 
and  for  its  weakness  that  head  paid  a  fearful  penalty. 

I  cherish  a  vivid  remembrance,  that  on  that  fearful  night 
there  was  an  irrepressible  conflict  between  my  several  members. 
No  two  of  them  would  go  the  same  way,  and  when  they  did,  it 
was  not  the  way  I  wanted  them  to  go.  The  only  consentane 
ous  movement  which  they  seemed  at  all  disposed  to  execute, 
was  a  spasmodic,  unsolicited,  and  uncontrollable  flight  ad  astra, 
in  which  my  head  foolishly  refused  to  participate,  and  for  its 
contumacy  was  left  behind,  the  stars  being  so  obliging  as  to 
come  down  in  dazzling  throngs  to  gaze  upon  my  helplessness. 
I  remembered  the  story  of  Miller  at  Lundy's  Lane,  of  Bruce 
(was  it?)  and  the  historical  Spider,  who  tried  twenty  times  be 
fore  he  hauled  himself  up,  and  I  didn't  give  it  up  so,  O  Editor  ! 
but  "  tried,  tried  again,"  until  I  believe  the  closed-up  sutures 
in  my  cranium  were  opened  as  widely  as  if  the  brains  were  out, 
and  a  pint  of  white  beans  were  in,  with  the  whole,  caput-al, 
arrangement  soaking  in  the  anatomist's  basin.  Such  a  wild, 
heterogeneous,  insane,  Saint  Yitus-like,  po/y-maniacal  orgie,  as 
my  shapely  and  generally  well-behaved  branches  went  into  that 
night,  will  never  be  forgotten. 

I  said  I  began  to  read  Walt  Whitman's  Yawp. 

Pardon  my  digression  —  I  have  been  trying  to  say  that  I  felt 
as  I  was  reading,  that  Walt — whatever  that  stands  for  —  was 
on  his  musical  skates  for  the  first  time. 

0  Shakespeare,  O  Milton,  0  Longfellow,  0  Henry  Clapp,  Jr., 
Editor  of  the  nicest  paper  in  the  country,  —  I  couldn't  see  it ! 

1  told  Mrs.  U.  so  —  I  asked  her  what  you,  O  Editor,  meant 
by  publishing  such  wretched  trumpery  ?     She  had  not  been 
favored  with  your  confidence,  and  said  she  didn't  know.     But 
she  didn't  think  it  trumpery  —  she  thought  there  was  some 
thing  in  it. 

As  Mrs.  U.  is  the  poet  of  my  concern,  her  suggestion  to  that 
effect  was  a  strong  point  in  favor  of  Mr.  Whitman's  barbaric 
Yawp. 

So  I  attempted  the  Yawp  again. 

Like  as  Mr.  Webster,  said  to  the  dandy  who  asked  him  if  he 
never  danced,  "I  never  had  intellect  enough  to  learn,"  so  I  say 


64  LEAVES   OF  GRASS   IMPRINTS. 

—  and  I  say  it  with  grateful  humility  —  "I  haven't  poetry 
enough  to  understand  Walt's  Yawp.  More  than  that,  I  don't 
want  to." 

From  the  New  York  Tribune.    (1859.) 

The  Boston  Courier  thinks  it  very  likely  that  the  poet  Walt 
Whitman,  as  is  reported,  now  drives  a  Broadway  omnibus,  and 
says : 

"Whitman's  extraordinary  abilities  have  always  been  fettered 
by  an  unconquerable  laziness.  The  last  time  we  saw  him  he 
was  mounted  upon  a  Brooklyn  omnibus,  his  legs  hanging  over 
the  side,  and  his  body  resting  comfortably  upon  his  elbow.  He 
appeared  to  be  absorbed  in  an  ecstatic  contemplation  of  his  own 
greatness.  His  dress  was  wonderful  beyond  description ;  high 
heavy  boots,  tight  trousers,  an  unprecedented  rough  jacket, 
and  a  tapering  tower  of  a  hat.  It  was  said  last  winter  that  he 
was  getting  up  a  series  of  lectures,  but  it  seems  that  his  natural 
indolence  has  conquered  his  poetic  inspirations." 

From  the  New  YorTc  Constellation.    (1859.) 

AN  OMNIBUS  DRIVER  OR  NOT?  —  A  leading  journal  in  this 
city  has  recently  been  duped  by  a  communication,  or  a  state 
ment  manufactured  in  its  own  office,  into  saying  that  Walt 
Whitman,  the  writer  of  "Leaves  of  Grass,"  one  of  the  most 
remarkable  and  original  contributions  to  our  literature  for  many 
years,  was  driving  an  omnibus. 

Now,  whether  he  has  ever  done  so  or  not,  we  neither  know 
nor  care  ;  but  certain  are  we  that  he  is  not,  at  present,  doing  so, 
as  we  have  ourselves  repeatedly  seen  and  conversed  with  him 
in  the  course  of  the  present  month.  Moreover,  we  will  put  the 
question  frankly  forward,  whether,  if  he  chose  to  earn  his  bread 
and  salt  by  so  doing,  it  ought,  necessarily,  to  be  commented 
upon  by  the  daily  press.  If  we  chose  to  occupy  the  position  of 
a  barber,  or  keep  a  lager  beer  saloon,  should  such  a  mode  of 
gaining  our  living  be  cited  to  our  discredit.  In  Europe  it  has 
never  been  so  cited.  (Mark  Lemon  was  an  alehouse-keeper ; 
Ferguson,  a  shepherd ;  Crawshay,  an  errand-boy ;  Burns,  a 
ploughman;  Thiers  and  Guizot,  newspaper  editors,  &c.,  &c.) 
And  we  regard  the  attempt  to  stain  the  supposititious  act  with  a 
ludicrous  celebrity,  as  having  been  made  in  the  very  worst  of 
tastes. 


FS3238 
L3S 


gcc«L<oorcffl 


^< 


